What was Lost
by the-anonymous-c
Summary: Behind the doors of the closed ward in St. Mungo's, someone starts to remember. And this time it's more than his name or joined up writing. COMPLETED.
1. powerless

"So what'd you do at school today, Gilderoy?" the ten-year-old boy's father asked him in a stately manner.

His tone was a dry, crisp one, like he was trying to determine whether his son were cut out for a job at the Ministry of Magic, like he did with various other workers he interviewed. Little did the boy know, this was exactly what Nerolinus Dictate Lockhart was doing.

The boy bent down to where his sack lay at his feet, and took out a notebook. Making his way toward the spiral staircase, he responded to his father, eager to spend as little time in his demanding elder's company as possible.

"We did some advanced arithmetic that I think I did okay on. Then we did social studies, but all we learn about there is Muggles—

"Gilderoy, it's a Muggle school, learning about Muggles is a benefit. You need to learn the basics before you go to Hogwarts. I've told you this before. And turn around and face me like a man while you're talking to me. What's that you've got there?"

The boy heaved a small sigh and turned to face his father. So much for spending the rest of the afternoon doing his favorite activity. He mentally berated himself for letting his father see the notebook.

"It's just a sketch pad sir," he said honestly.

"Let me see it."

Gilderoy obediently handed the sketch pad over to his father, and watched as he examined it, an expression of distaste fixed on his features. Gilderoy waited half-hopefully as Nerolinus flipped open the book and scanned a couple of pages, his hard expression intensifying with every page he turned. Finally, he snapped the sketch book shut and tucked it under his arm, looking mildly angry. Gilderoy's heart sank.

"How long ago, boy," Lockhart senior whispered steadily, "Did I order you to cease this foolish pleasure? Did I not tell you ever since you were young, did I not warn you explicitly to wake up to the idiocy of this-this-

"Art, sir," Gilderoy whispered, only too aware of the tears threatening to spill from his eyes. Why did he have to be so damn sensitive?

His father glared at him and he lowered his head.

"This is absolute feminine garbage. What does a man gain from sitting doodling things like the ocean and birds and other such insignificant fodder!" He spat out each word as if it tasted of phlegm. He paused for a second to rake a hand through his slicked back blond hair in exasperation.

"If this continues, you will have no deeds, nothing in your name when you lie in death's cold embrace. Nothing, Gilderoy. That is not what I want from a son of mine."

Taking his son roughly by the arm, Nerolinus shoved him into the adjacent living room and turned to the leaping fire.

Gilderoy realized only too late what he was doing. A strangled sound halfway between a sob and an anguished whimper escaped him as his father ceremoniously chucked his precious sketchbook filled with years' worth of beautifully made drawings, hours and hours of work and the joy and pleasure that came when he had finished, into the ravenous flames. The book went alight extremely easily.

"I am ashamed of you, Gilderoy," he could faintly hear his father say over the seemingly deafening, heart-wrenching crackle of flames devouring paper. "Very ashamed."

Tears were now streaming freely down the boy's face, some hitting the floor to spread out into soft pools, others running down his neck and robes. His eyes remained fixed on the smouldering heap of ash which had once been his passion, his life, his pride.

Gilderoy woke in a cold sweat to the worried face of Healer Loell.


	2. nightmares away

**a/n: sorry to people who wanted me to continue this, because you probably thought I had given up and wasn't going to. Actually, this story just got left behind for a while. Sorry. I hope you like it.**

_This was me _Gilderoy thought numbly, staring at the picture in his hands, his face screwed up in concentration. _No, that's not right. This **is **me. No. It's not. Help me, please. Who am I?_

He must have said the last part out loud because a healer named Aldalone Loell came bustling over to his bed from where she had been tending another patient on the other side of the closed ward. Gilderoy noticed that it was the curtained end. The end where Frank and Alice were living. The healers never allowed him back there.

Loell came to his bedside and asked what was wrong. She was a plump, younger woman with blonde hair that she kept tied up. She looked anxious.

"What's the matter, Gilderoy?"

And all of a sudden, Gilderoy found that he didn't know. He didn't know why he was sitting on that bed, why he was in St. Mungo's hospital, why he existed, or who he was.

"Who am I?" he asked stupidly into the air between himself and the friendly healer. He had a weird thought about _What if words were solid? _but didn't say it.

Healer Loell went over to his bedside table.

"Did you drink all of your sleeping draught, Gilderoy?" she asked him, her brown eyes staring into his forget-me-not blue ones, trying to detect any guilt or deceit.

"Yes," he answered, without any hesitation. He had only hidden the potion in the beginning, in the drawer in which he kept his robes. But now he was used to the acrid taste so that he could stand it.

Gilderoy's stomach felt oddly empty.

"Could I have something to eat?" he ventured, watching Healer Loell rearrange the quilt on the end of his bed.

"Please?" he asked when he got no response.

"Gilderoy, it's four o clock in the morning," she told him.

No wonder she was still around! Gilderoy remembered her telling him how she had a 10-5 night shift, which was why she wasn't there in the mornings.

"Ad-Ada-

"Ad, Gilderoy. You can just call me Ad. I've told you that before." The witch smiled tightly, and Gilderoy knew what she was thinking. He wasn't even remembering simple things very well, and that was after The Obliviation. Or so, that was what he had heard people saying. Healer Loell had told him that healers were only allowed to tell "those who couldn't remember" so much.

Gilderoy had been here in the closed ward for almost 3 years now, and all he had been told was that something had happened to him that made him lose his memory. He had asked the two healers who were in charge of him, Healer Loell and Healer Elleyne, but they had told him there were things that couldn't be brought into the light at the moment. So Gilderoy had let them alone about it completely. In fact, he had forgotten about it completely…until today.

His stomach churned, and he looked to where Healer Loell was now checking on the sallow-faced man in a bed nearby. She had a slight frown on as she turned to Healer Brodyn.

"Bode's breathing seems slightly irregular when he sleeps," she whispered slowly.

Gilderoy frowned as well. Bode was his most mysterious ward-mate. He had a speech impediment, but Gilderoy didn't know he had a breathing problem too. Was that why he never left his bed?

"Ad?" he asked quietly into a pause in the two Healer's conversation. Aldalone Loell pardoned herself from Brodyn for a while, and came back over to his bedside.

"Yes, what is it?" she asked, sounding a little impatient.

"I had a dream last night."

He didn't even register the words in his mind before saying them. His mind seemed to be constantly trying to play tricks on him, and he never remembered having a dream until now. In fact, it was what had awakened him from the deep fog of sleep that usually shrouded him until a late 11 o clock in the morning.

And unlike most dreams, he found when his previously obliviated mind groped for what had happened in it, it was seized upon immediately.

Gilderoy came back to earth to find Healer Loell studying his face intently.

"Are you sure you've taken your sleeping potion? Dreams are extremely rare when it takes effect."

Gilderoy nodded immediately.

"Ok…what was it like? Your dream, I mean? Can you remember?"

Yes. He could. He remembered perfectly. A little _too _perfectly.

Leaning over the edge of his bed, he started to speak, then hesitated, searching for the right words.

"It was…very real," he said, and this time though he tried to control it, his voice had a shaky quality to it. "It felt as if…I was there. In it. Like it really happened."

Healer Loell nodded.

"Oftentimes dreams do seem real. I remember having one once where I was climbing a mountain. I could feel details like the harsh wind whipping at my face and I could smell the sea from somewhere. It was all very peaceful…then I fell."

Gilderoy looked at her. She gave him a half smile.

"But it was all just a dream when I woke up of course, but when I lost my grip on the rocks in the dream, that couldn't have felt less like dreaming. It felt _real_."

Gilderoy thought about this, but somehow it didn't seem to match the same sense of reality he had felt before he awoke.

"Is that what you mean by real?"

"Sort of. I don't really know. I feel tired."

"Well I won't stop you from going back to sleep."

Healer Loell blew out the candle she had lit beside Gilderoy's bed and stood up again. Gilderoy was indeed tired again. Even though he could remember the dream perfectly, thinking of it exhausted him. But whenever he tried to think of something else, his mind would not permit it. It was almost as if it was all he had to think of.

"Was the dream good or bad?"

Healer Loell's voice came to him on a sort of tide. He was quickly losing consciousness.

But nevertheless, Gilderoy knew the answer to that one.

"Bad. It was very bad," he added with a slight shudder. His words sounded muffled and clumsy in his own dull, thumping ears.

Healer Loell's footsteps faded away and came back to his bedside quickly.

"Here. This is 100 Dreamless Sleeping Draught. That'll keep the nightmares away."

He felt her hand lift his chin and tasted something sour and unwanted trickling down his throat.

"_You're late," the man snarled, bringing his hand upwards._

Gilderoy tried to move his head away, to close his lips, but he found he could not move easily. The potion was taking him.

_The impact was cold and hard._

There were no dreams that night.


	3. the mystery in the mirror

**a/n: here you are, an actual update from me to you! (If any of the people who were reading this to begin with didn't give up, lol) Had a sudden outburst of thoughts for this story, and ideas for later on…unfortunately, however, I have not one, but TWO AP tests tomorrow. And of course, when you have doom impending on you rapidly, what do you do but write fanfiction! **

The next few days for Gilderoy passed with peaceful, dreamless nights following them. Every night, Healer Loell or Healer Brodyn would give him the potion, and every night he would take it.

Every morning after breakfast, Gilderoy would learn joined up writing with Healer Elleyne, a slightly plump, pleasant young medi-witch. He could remember his first lesson, and how he hadn't wanted to take it, protesting quite avidly that he would rather sit in the chair beside his bed, playing with a bunch of paper clips that some Healer had absentmindedly left lying around. He got a fascination out of hooking the silver, shining metal together at different angles to make designs, and even little people. Creating things like this delighted him.

Quite apart from this, learning joined up writing had no creativity to it whatsoever. Gilderoy had tried putting random letters together, but he knew that it wasn't excepted, they didn't make words. Didn't make _sense._

Sort of like the thoughts he had been having of late. Thoughts of ink and paper floating across his mind, thoughts of color instead of black and white.

One particular day, a week or so after his terrible dream that he still could not erase, Gilderoy was busy looking at himself in the little mirror on the wall near the writing desk he used to share with Hayden (until Hayden died unexpectedly the year before, that was).

Gilderoy liked to look at himself in the mirror. He liked especially to smile at the mirror and see himself smiling back. Gilderoy thought his smile was just about the best thing about him, and he had grown awfully fond of it. He wondered if he was fond of it before the Accident sometimes, but most of the time he just never thought about the time before the Accident. In truth, it didn't seem to him like there ever _was_ a time before the Accident, and as a result he kept forgetting his true age.

While he was playing his games with the mirror, Gilderoy noticed someone else coming into the picture that up until now had been a self-portrait of a goofily grinning young man with wavy blond hair, blue eyes and very white teeth. The hand on his shoulder came unexpectedly, causing Gilderoy to jump a bit, before turning around sheepishly to face the Healer.

"Didn't you hear me calling you, Gilderoy?" she asked kindly, but with an edge of impatience to her tone.

Gilderoy hung his head. 

"No," he said simply and truthfully. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his twin in the mirror going through the same motions, moving his mouth in the same way.

"You haven't been having bad dreams, again?" she asked sternly. "You did agree you would tell us if that kind of thing happened again."

"No, I haven't," Gilderoy declared, shifting position and crossing his arms loosely. "If I had, you would know. I would've informed you."

Healer Elleyne let out an unexpected, small burst of laughter. The expression on her face was one of amusement.

"What?" Gilderoy asked, going a bit pink in the face. He was more curious than embarrassed really, and turned from side to side, looking for the source of her amusement.

"It's just you," she explained "You can't help looking at yourself in the mirror when you talk. You do it all the time."

"Really?" He couldn't think what else to say.

"Yes. It's not unusual, really. I had a sister who would do it all the time."

"_Had _a sister?"

"Well, come on," Healer Elleyne said, turning around so quickly it made Gilderoy feel dizzy. "It's time for your lesson. You _do _want to learn to write before Christmas, don't you?"

A bit confused, Gilderoy followed her to a cabinet which she unlocked to retrieve some nice thick parchment paper and some quills, which she then brought back to the small wooden desk under the mirror.

The lesson continued rather uneventfully, until Gilderoy lost interest and began to drag his quill over the parchment, making things other than letters. He was in the process of making a blob that looked something like an egg patty when Healer Elleyne patiently told him he would have to stop doodling, and would he like to learn his name?

Honestly, Gilderoy couldn't see the point, so he stifled a fake yawn.

"I'm tired again," he said.

"You've had breakfast a couple of hours ago," Healer Elleyne told him, not believing him. All the same, she decided it wouldn't hurt to end for the day. They had been going for over an hour, and she couldn't expect her charge's attention span to be too great. It was like dealing with a child, almost…and in other ways, not at all.

"Go back to bed and get some more rest, if that's what you're after."

Elleyne watched Gilderoy walk back to his bed and sit on the end for a while, sort of staring into space. When next she looked, he was fast asleep. She supposed he must have really been tired.

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"Hey! Nancy boy! Get over here!"

The small first year boy with the wavy blond hair turned around to see them marching across the grounds towards him. He clutched his books closer to his chest. He should have known he couldn't escape them. At least it was only Wilkes and Rosier.

"What did we tell you boy?" screamed Evan Rosier, his tone blazing with anticipation and his round, stupid face shining with glee. Jacob Wilkes cackled evilly.

The blond haired boy started walking faster towards the lake, but Wilkes and Rosier were quicker. Soon they had him cornered with his back to the lake, which made him undeniably uncomfortable. Why couldn't they just leave him alone? What did they want from him?

"You got any money in your pockets?" Rosier spat out suddenly, as if on a whim. Wilkes, who was wiser in the ways of bullying the helpless, snorted.

The boy started to edge around the lake, but Rosier stepped out and grabbed his arm. "You're not going anywhere," he growled. A nasty grin formed on Wilkes's face as he took the boy's other arm.

"Do you know where we are?" he whispered into the boy's ear. The boy's eyes widened and he began to struggle. Panicked thoughts flashed through his mind.

_They're going to throw me into the lake. The squid, what'll I do! The squid eats people alive, that's what that sixth year said._

Then,

_Don't be stupid, the sixth year wasn't telling the truth…_

The fear and frustration built up in the struggling boy and just before he felt his feet being forcefully lifted from the ground, he screamed, "Let me go!"

Gilderoy just had time to open his mouth and call for help before the shocking cold of the water enveloped him. It was a chilly autumn day, and the water felt like it was below freezing. Darkness impeded on his vision in the murky water as he stroked upwards without thinking. Closer, closer to the surface…he was getting closer…

Everything went black.

When next he woke he found himself on a clean white bed, the covers tucked neatly around him.

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"Elleyne?" Gilderoy exclaimed, sitting up so quickly he felt a sickish thrill. The clean white covers fell back around him, and he sat there in a state of disarray, staring in a state of alarm at the young Healer.

"Well, that's the first time you've called me by only my first name," Elleyne muttered, not entirely disapproving. "Something must really be wrong. Are you all right?"

"What?" Gilderoy asked stupidly.

"Are you okay? Just in case you didn't know, that is _not_ a normal way to wake up." Her face grew suddenly serious. "You didn't have another dream, did you?"

Gilderoy appeared to be staring into space. When Elleyne followed his gaze, she saw he was looking in the little mirror across the room. His own face looked back at him from afar, confused and a little bit scared.

"Yes, I think I did," Gilderoy said softly. His voice had a pleasant but serious undertone to it. "If you could call it that."


	4. speaking of dreams

**a/n: Gilderoy is an annoying name. Maybe I shall find an excuse to call him Roy in future, just to save me the trouble of typing that thing out. I AM FREE OF MY TESTS! I did not have to bury myself either! And so now you get my I'm-so-full-of-gratefulness update! I'm happy for you. Really I am.**

The pleasantly cool breeze whipped lightly through his hair as he added another stroke to the canvas. He was out back in the garden, sweating a little in concentration, but it was good, healthy sweat. He couldn't feel any better.

The thirteen year-old boy's heart was completely taken over by a heady, wondrous feeling of joy as he dabbed life into the pale red and yellow flowers, remaking them on the canvas where they would live on, far past the time when they would wither and make way for winter's cruel reign.

He was taking advantage of the freedom that came with being left alone for an afternoon at home. The mansion was too much for him, too filled with unpleasant feelings lingering on the air, waiting to prey on him.

Of course, he would not have dared to do this had his father been home. His father was an intimidating figure, and if he found that his only son had been caught _painting _or creating any other work of art, something that he had expressly made clear was strictly forbidden…the boy shuddered at the thought of what might happen then.

It was always possible a servant might catch him at it, but the boy was too desperate for this pleasure, the way he had of taking something beautiful and recreating it to be somehow even more beautiful than it had been to begin with. Making it _his_.

There was nothing in the world to match the feeling he got when he had finished a picture or painting, and looking at it almost surprisedly, he would realize that _he had made this_. This was _him_.

Of course the time was ticking until he would have to hurry up to the extra walk-in closet which adjoined with his room, and which no one used. He would then have to hide the canvas and paints under the floorboards he had pried up when shut in the closet for an hour one rainy day as punishment. (Coincidentally, this was for accidentally bringing up the subject of art at the dinner table).

The boy thought of the sketch pads, quills, charcoal, and ink that were also stored under these boards, and thought how upsetting it was to create such beams of light, only to have them hidden in the darkness, where no one could see them. He couldn't even look at them at his leisure for fear of being caught at it.

4:30. The boy snapped out of his peaceful reverie. He had been sitting with his head tilted back and a small, vague smile of contentment on his face. He had been taking longer than he had thought!

Jumping up in one fluid motion, Gilderoy gathered up his materials carefully, albeit quickly, and speed walked down the garden path, eyes darting warily up to the great windows of the looming mansion and back to his load of supplies every once in a while. Then he reached the door, and the dark of the house swallowed him up. Where no one could see him.

But someone had.

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Someone was shaking him, had been shaking him for perhaps some time.

"Gilderoy, get on up with you. There's something you've got to do."

Gilderoy opened his eyes reluctantly. His eyelids felt heavy and lazy. Healer Loell was looking at him sharply.

"Were you dreaming?" she asked very tentatively. She had been asking him this for the past couple of nights when he awoke spontaneously, as if always expecting that this was exactly what he was doing if he made any strange movements or sounds in his sleep.

"No. I mean…yes. I believe I was."

"Not bad, was it?"

"Oh no."

"Why do you say it like that?"

"Why did you wake me up? I liked that sleep, I did."

"Don't get testy. It won't do you a bit of good for what's coming up." Ad's voice became gentler as she told him her business. "You will be discussing your dreams with Healer Brodyn and I today. It may be hard to recall everything, but we are trying to figure out how these dreams manage to be so persistent. Hopefully, we can find a way to make them less bothersome."

"I don't find them bothersome." Gilderoy's voice faltered on this a bit, however, and Ad noticed it.

"Gilderoy, no one likes to be plagued by dreams like these. Maybe not all of them are bad, as far as content goes, but we are afraid that they will hurt your recovery."

Ah, of course. His recovery from the Accident. Gilderoy couldn't help feeling a bit bitter. Maybe this was from being awakened at four in the morning, but possibly there were other reasons as well.

"You don't think I've recovered at all," he said quietly.

"Well," Ad told him fairly, "I wouldn't say that. You do seem to have a better sense of self-identity now than you did a month ago."

Healer Brodyn appeared next to Loell, and whispered something in her ear, before turning to Gilderoy and straightening his spectacles. Brodyn was a man who looked older than he really was. He was tall and lean with gray hair but could not be any older than forty, Gilderoy thought. He had never really liked Brodyn much; when Gilderoy had first arrived at the closed ward, Brodyn had been the one to receive him and the first person to greet him when he had awoken the next day with no idea of who he was, where he was, or anything.

As a result, he had been unnaturally cheery. (Ignorance will do this to you). Brodyn had been very terse and official with Gilderoy, telling him only where he was and his name, and not answering any of his other questions like Did Brodyn's head hurt like his did? Did everyone's head have a bump on it? Was this his house? Why was he sitting here? What was the broken stick he had found in his pocket? In some cases, first impressions mean everything.

Brodyn looked over Gilderoy critically before speaking.

"You've been having bad dreams, I hear," he said. It was not a question.

"They aren't all bad," Gilderoy said, toying with his sheets.

"You can't know that for sure," Brodyn said repressively. "Over half of the content of a dream is lost for good once the dreamer wakes. You have been seen to experience restlessness in your sleep."

Gilderoy felt incensed, for maybe the first true time in his remembered life (which admittedly, was not long). For some reason, Brodyn's statement had gotten on his nerves.

"I remember everything about every 'dream' I've had here," he said boldly, feeling a ridiculous sense of naughtiness. Even though he knew what he was saying was the truth, Gilderoy couldn't look directly at the Healer as he spoke. Brodyn didn't believe him, as expected.

"Well," he said evenly, "If you can remember everything you dreamed, why don't you tell us all about it?"

Gilderoy remained silent. He didn't want to tell Brodyn about the dreams. In fact, he felt afraid to do so.

"Why are you hesitating to call them dreams, Gilderoy?" Ad asked him.

He thought on this. "They seem too…personal to me to be dreams. Remember how I told you about how everything seemed so real in the first dream I had? It's been that way with the last two as well, and they seemed so real that right now I remember every bit of them and they feel too personal to tell anyone."

Ad looked hesitant, then thoughtful. Brodyn however, only looked satisfied. Nodding, he scribbled something on the clipboard he carried before looking down at Gilderoy once again.

"Well, I suppose that's all I have to inquire about at the moment, Mr. Lockhart," he said in a superior sort of way. His tone became _very _stern all of a sudden as he said "And you will take the 100 Dreamless Draught every night without fail from now on. I mean it, do you understand? We have prescribed it to you for a reason."

"But I have been taking it!" Gilderoy said, feeling frustrated.

Brodyn looked astounded and angry. "You must learn not to lie so often, Gilderoy," he said slowly. "You may go back to bed now. I'm sure you're tired." Then he turned and left, Healer Loell following him.

But Gilderoy had never felt less like sleeping. Morning was coming anyway, and the ward was very silent. The patients in the beds around him were all sound asleep, and the two Healers were now elsewhere.

That was when Gilderoy had an idea that made his blood race. He had been waiting for a silent, still moment in the hospital, which was rare indeed, for the day or so.

At his last writing lesson with Healer Elleyne, Gilderoy had managed to get her to give him a few sheets of thick parchment paper, telling her he would put it to good use by writing letters.

Now, sliding one of these pieces of paper out from under his pillow, Gilderoy retrieved a quill from his bedside table and paused, the quill trembling in his hand, which was poised above the paper.

Closing his eyes, taking a breath and opening them, Gilderoy drew a fat line across the paper, then made another line, and another and another, striving to create what he saw in his mind's eye. Quicker and quicker his quill sped across the parchment, in quick yet unsure strokes.

Gilderoy leaned over his bed, perched on the edge of his bed and scribbled like mad. His breathing was coming in and out very fast, and his chest was heaving. Suddenly he let out a short, strangled yell of frustration, and scribbled messily all over the paper, drawing a large X over the whole thing, so hard that it cut clean through.

The paper floated down to the floor where it lay, messy side down on the ground. It sat there as if making a statement. The slashes in the parchment stood out just as clearly as the tears in Gilderoy's eyes as he sat, breathing slowing down, eyes averted from the place where it lay.

Outside, in the world which he couldn't remember existing, it was starting to snow.


	5. what's in a name

**a/n: in case no one could tell, this is my favorite story at the moment. Heh. **

It was summertime

A fifteen year old boy was sitting on an overturned bucket, a large quality sketchpad in hand. The garden that surrounded him was in full bloom. He concentrated hard as he drew another curving line to connect to what would become the whole of his masterpiece.

The sound of warm, full laughter came across to him.

"You're going to have to hold still longer than that," the boy said amiably, smiling to himself as he continued to draw. The curves of a girl's face soon became apparent on his paper.

The laughter again. It sent a sort of tingle down his spine. Not an unpleasant one by far. He looked up to gain his perspective again and…

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Healer Elleyne stared back at him.

"Ungh?" Gilderoy murmured with a surprised inflection to his tone. It was then that he noticed the piercing yellow light that was searing his eyes quite unkindly.

"Well, that's a good note to wake up on," Elleyne remarked. "Come on, get up sleepyhead."

Gilderoy slid out of bed and shuffled lethargically over to where she was now bustling around near the small wooden desk. There was some toast and a couple of random fortune cookies sitting on the desk. The steam that rose from the toast looked extremely welcoming.

"I'm hungry," Gilderoy mentioned.

"And that is what the food is for," Elleyne told him, laughing a bit. "You do know you've slept up till noon. And maybe you would've gone longer, if I hadn't wakened you just then."

"mmm"

"Hmm?"

"Good food. Where have the cookies come from?" Elleyne looked up and he indicated the fortune cookies.

"Ah, Brodyn had Chinese last night. Though as you can see, he's well gone." She eyed the cookies for a while before saying, "Let's go on and help ourselves."

Gilderoy reached for a cookie, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth. It was a while before he noticed he was eating paper.

"BLEHK!" Gilderoy quickly (and quite literally) coughed up his fortune.

"That's your second weird sound today," Elleyne commented as she read her own fortune ('You will find true love in an unexpected place'), rolled her eyes, and stuck it in the pocket of her white robes.

"Weird noises are my profession. Would you happen to know what this says?" he asked Elleyne, giving her a charming smile as he gave her the wet piece of paper.

"Oh, UCK! Right, fine. 'The snow will bring you visitors from the past.' Good luck on that one."

"Hey! That means I'll have _actual visitors_!" Gilderoy's heart rate sped in anticipation.

"You do know that was only a fortune cookie, don't you Roy?"

"Roy?"

Gilderoy flinched a tiny bit and stood in what seemed to be enormous shock. A blur of color and motion seemed to flash through his brain; none of it made the least bit of sense. Amid this confusion, he could hear a voice, muted but calling him.

"Gilderoy?" Elleyne had gone back to the use of his full name, apparently fearing she had done something to him. "I didn't mean to cause you to act like this…hey, can you hear me? Gilderoy?"

Hearing the concern in her voice, Gilderoy made an attempt to turn and face her. The noise, the rushing images, the zoned out feeling ended, and he was simply standing by a wooden desk next to Elleyne in the plain white room of a hospital. Where he had always been.

Gilderoy wiggled his toes to relieve some tension, and took a glance at his reflection in the small mirror he so loved. No wonder Elleyne had been frightened; he was white as his own bed sheets.

Gilderoy forced himself to talk.

"Yes, I'm fine. Sorry. It's just…say that again."

Elleyne just stared at him, confused. "Say what?"

"What you just said."

"Roy?"

"Yes! That's it, Roy! That's my name!"

"It's not your true name, Gilderoy. It's just a nickname."

"No, I've been called it before. That nickname, I mean. Someone has called me Roy!"

"Was that in one of your dreams or…"

"No, it wasn't in a dream!" Gilderoy said, completely truthful this time. "I just…remembered it, I suppose."

Elleyne looked jubilant. "You remembered? Are you certain? _Remembered_?"

"That is what I said, isn't it?" Gilderoy said, more to himself than Elleyne. He had just realized the significance of this, the reason she was so excited.

For the first time since the Accident, Gilderoy had recognized something which had not happened anytime after it. Was he making progress? Elleyne seemed to think it likely, because she was all of a sudden much more cheerful than she had been before this discovery.

"Here, we're learning some more writing today," she said happily, taking out some paper and patting the seat at the desk. Gilderoy sat.

For an hour they worked and worked at massing countless letters together to make countless words, until finally something of great importance (in Elleyne's opinion) happened.

"That's your name, Gilderoy!" she said, pointing to the sixteen letters he had just written out rather laboriously. Eight letters, space, eight letters. Nice and even. Gilderoy was already developing a fondness for it, though he didn't see why on earth Elleyne had to be so excited. It was really kind of annoying.

When he asked her about this, she looked at him in mild surprise.

"Because it's your name, Gilderoy. It's YOU."

"Yes, that is very nice, isn't it?" Gilderoy said vacantly. Elleyne could tell he didn't quite understand the concept. After a period of deep thought, she appeared to have an idea.

"Hmm…I wonder…well, it's worth a try."

Gilderoy grinned at her, then inquired on what she was talking about.

"Well…Gilderoy, do you know what an…an autograph is?"

"Auto graph. No."

"Doesn't ring a bell?"

"…No. Should it?"

"It could have. You see, back…before the Accident---

She paused to see how Gilderoy was taking this. He was leaning forward in his seat with a big dazzling smile on his face and curiosity in his eyes, and why wouldn't he? No one had been permitted to say much to Gilderoy about before he was obliviated. She never had understood why, and this was why she was taking the risk now. She started her sentence over, this time talking in a stronger voice.

"Autographs are signed pictures of oneself. That is, it's a picture of _you_, signed by _you _with your name. Generally, you give them to f…to people." Elleyne paused. She had been about to say 'fans' but she didn't know if she wanted to go that far quite yet.

"The point is, you liked to sign pictures of yourself and give them to other people."

"Why?"

"Well, I imagine it makes you feel important. It makes the people you give it to happy."

There was a brief silence. Then Gilderoy spoke again, eagerly.

"Can I know more about myself?"

"Not now. I may tell you more if I have permission." And she planned to ask for it as soon as she could. It felt rather good to be telling him things that meant so much to him, to have him hanging on her every word, his bright blue eyes lit up as he leaned toward her, waiting on her next syllable.

Gilderoy did not hide his disappointment. Elleyne checked the clock.

"Hey, I've got to go tend to Broderick now. Think you can handle yourself for a while?" She smiled kindly at his disappointed expression. "Look, I promise that I'll let you know more as soon as I can. Alright, Gilderoy?"

He looked at her, and smiled a little. Then a lot.

"Call me Roy."

"Well, I'm not so sure that's…"

"No, I like it. It makes me feel sort of strange, and maybe sad…I don't know. But I like it. I know that. I like it a lot."

Elleyne grinned. "Okay, Roy. Have a good one."

Gilderoy walked over to his bed, still smiling, and began to sort through his drawers. Coming up finally with a picture clasped in his hand, and a triumphant expression on his face, Gilderoy took his quill from the bedside table.

The picture had been taken before the Accident. It was of Gilderoy on a broom, kind of lounging there, the wind blowing through his hair, smiling and winking. Gilderoy didn't really understand the picture, or how he ever could have flown like that. But the fact that it was him was good enough.

Slowly and deliberately he began to write, and when he was finished, he stared down at the picture, the _autographed _picture, as it was called. And stared and stared.

And suddenly, he felt a warm, euphoric feeling wash over him, like something was stroking him down the back. Because he understood now. He understood perfectly.

"I am Gilderoy Lockhart," he whispered softly. Then, a surge of blissful energy poured over him and he jumped up from his bed and stretched his arms out to either side of him, smiling madly. He felt the roiling excitement in the pit of his stomach, and he knew what happened next could not be helped for all the world.

Gilderoy stood there on the floor of the closed ward and shouted at the top of his lungs, holding the autograph up high and grinning from ear to ear.

"I AM GILDEROY LOCKHART!"

There was a silence in which great many people were awakened from their sleep at the sound of his shout. Then, from the far end of the room, came the familiar, laughing voice of Elleyne.

"Hush, you!"


	6. what was lost

**a/n: I dunno, maybe it's the fact that we're doing horror stories in my short story class, but this chapter turned out not only extremely short but also kinda creepy, imo. I've been looking forward to writing this part for a while. **

_Dear Diary,_

_I am not feeling well. I'm not feeling well because I remember him._

_He handed me the scraps and I made little people out of them and he said "beautiful" and we played with them, made up stories about them and their secret lives. Then I put my hand in his and we went walking on the beach by the waves, playfully skipping in and out of them. I filled a bucket with sand for our sandcastle while he dug the moat. I looked into his eyes and found that they were mine too. I told him how I never wanted to grow up, and he told me I didn't have to. I wasn't sure what he meant by that then, but it didn't matter because maybe we could eat out on the beach today and we would only eat pie. Because the manwas gone, and **he **wouldn't know. I wished he wouldn't come back. _

_We looked up at the sunset. There were pockets of orange and pink, with red spilling out from them. I looked at him and knew he wished he could draw it. "Beautiful," he said._

_The sky was bleeding._

Vanessa Reid yawned as she got up from her desk. She frowned at her diary, lying open in front of her. She hadn't noticed writing half of it.

It was 2:00 in the morning, yet she couldn't sleep.

Tossing some of her dark brown curls over her shoulder, she flinched at a small sound coming from downstairs.

_Just the cat. _

Why was she being so jumpy of late? Or, abandoning jumpy, 'disturbed of the mind' would do. Without thinking, Vanessa fingered the wand that lay close by, resting on her small dresser. When she realized what she was doing, she drew her hand away with an indignant little sound.

Really, what _had _gotten into her?

Twenty-four years old, and her mind had picked now to start freaking out at random, and—her eyes passed over the open diary—bringing up memories from the past which she really should have forgotten. Which really shouldn't matter. She had to go to work bright and early tomorrow, and the job of a Gringott's curse breaker was certainly not easy. If she didn't get her sleep, how was she going to function?

But that wasn't what was really bothering her, and Vanessa knew it.

As if controlled by some other force, her eyes strayed to the diary again.

_That's over with._

Getting up, she walked over to it and shut it with a little more force than was necessary. Then, on second thought, she went as far as to remove the first row of books on her bookcase of staggering size (mostly romance novels which she wouldn't have admitted to reading for anything) and stuck the diary in the back in a punishing manner, before putting the first row of books up again so as to fully obscure the stupid thing.

_Now let's try this again, _Vanessa thought, for seemingly the fourth time that night.

Walking slowly over to her bed, she sank down upon it with a sigh, stifling another yawn. Turning her face away from the bookcase, she waited as her eyes finally grew too heavy to maintain their constant vigil.

It was a half hour later that Vanessa Reid fell asleep.

And it was two hours later that she was found sprawled in the snow at the bottom of her front steps, dead.


	7. your biggest & most devoted fan

**a/n: HA! Long time, no update, huh? Well I'm back!  Fairly short, but enjoy. I had fun writing part of this. I kept laughing. If you read it, I'm fairly sure you'll figure out which part I'm talking about.**

It was afternoon, on a bleary sort of winter day. Gilderoy was sitting on the end of his bed, practicing autographs. He thought he was getting nearly good enough to distribute them now. The letters of his name were looking more like "Gilderoy Lockhart" than "Gildery Locklenart." He was so intent upon his work that he didn't notice Elleyne come running up to him.

Breathlessly, Elleyne dumped what Gilderoy thought must be a thousand letters out of a large cardboard box she was carrying onto his bed. He turned and stared at them.

"What?" The one syllable was all that left his mouth as he stared slack jawed at all the letters.

"Your mail," Elleyne declared, with a touch of pride in her voice.

"What, all from today?" Gilderoy asked, still not able to believe what he was seeing. "But I've never even got mail before, how do these people know I exist?"

Gilderoy took a letter off of the pile at random and surveyed it in dumb shock. It was from someone by the name of

_Gladys Gudgeon_

_43 Crescent Circle_

_Little Whinging, Surrey_

"_I _didn't even know _these _people existed!" he exclaimed breathlessly. There was something very exciting, as well as mystifying, about this.

Elleyne, who up until now had been watching him with a grin on her face, now looked somewhat doubtful.

"Well…here's the truth. This IS your mail. Your mail from every day since you've arrived here at St. Mungo's. You see, I got permission today from higher staff to give this to you, and though I can't tell you much about before the Accident yet, this" (she indicated the letters in one sweeping gesture) "may jog your memory a bit. We hope. Though you can tell one thing from this stack of letters right off, and it's that you were…quite famous."

She stood looking at him with a half nervous expression. Gilderoy looked over at her, not sure how he should be reacting.

This was far too much news to get at one time. He actually had mail, Elleyne had known it, and had been hiding it for so long. And he had so _much _of it! Because he was…he was

"Famous?" was all he could get out.

Elleyne nodded, still looking nervous.

"I understand if you're upset at me, but try to see that it was something I _had _to do. Or else I wouldn't be here now. I'd have probably lost my job. And giving too much to you early on, we've learned that that can be…well, it can be disastrous."

She said this in a hushed voice, and Gilderoy whispered back,

"You could have_ snuck_ the letters to me."

As soon as he said it, he knew he was being childish, and felt rather disgusted by himself, but he didn't take it back. He knew most of Elleyne's incentive was likely to have been concern for him, but he remained silent and began to messily tear open the envelope from Gladys, which he still held loosely in his hand.

Elleyne was quiet a moment, and then said, "Well, I hope you find what you're looking for." Then she walked away to go see to some other patient.

Her voice had sounded sort of sad, and Gilderoy didn't feel like he could watch her go at the moment, so instead he pulled the letter from its envelope and flattened it out. It was dated from two years back, in January. He started to read.

_**Dear Gilderoy Lockhart,**_

**_I am your absolute biggest fan! I have just gotten through reading _Voyages with Vampires**, **_and it's got to be my best book yet! Of course, nothing could compare to the way you faced that werewolf in the telephone booth! How DID you do it! I would have been soooo scared! But then, you ARE sooo brave! My friend and I were talking about you (it's our favorite thing to do you know) and we came up with the idea that the werewolf could've been caught off guard by your charm! It was my idea first, but Joanna swears it was hers. I had to hit her in the head with _Gadding with Ghouls _to make her stop crying once I told her I'd tell you that, and it was my new copy too! I checked for dents, but there aren't any. My 20th birthday is coming up soon, and I was hoping (and I know you're _outrageously _busy, so ignore this if it's out of line) very much hoping for an autograph from you if you should get the chance! _**

_**From your biggest and most devoted fan,**_

_**Gladys XOXOXO**_

_**PS: I find myself wishing sometimes that raging trolls would come to attack my lowly little town, just so you could come to the rescue!**_

Gilderoy folded the letter back up extremely slowly. The first coherent musing he had was to wonder at how anyone could possibly use so many exclamation points in such a brief span of paper. He didn't know confusion could exist so prominently as it did now in his aching head.

Werewolves? What exactly were those? And, more importantly, how had he managed to _fight _them? He would have to ask Elleyne. And ghouls, and vampires? What were they?

The fact that Gilderoy had at some point written books of some sort was apparent by the random titles listed sporadically throughout the deranged girl's letter. What was "gadding" and why had it been important enough for him to put in the title of a book? He could barely write his own name now! It certainly was amazing.

Gladys Gudgeon was 22 now. So much for that birthday autograph. At least Gilderoy knew what THAT was. Briefly, he mused at sending her one now, but perhaps she would be angry that he hadn't written in so long. Quite possibly she had given up on him. Then he wondered if he ever HAD written back. It was possible. He hoped she had.

Gilderoy, still thoroughly confused, but now eager for more, grabbed another letter and lay down on his bed this time, putting the heap of letters to one side in order to read comfortably. It was going to be a long night tonight, judging by the size of this pile.


	8. visitors from the past

**a/n: DISCLAIMER: wow, I don't even own some of the text in this chapter. Some of the things people say are actually from the "closed ward" chapter in OotP. So don't sue me. I have no money. **

The holiday season at the tail end of the year found Gilderoy signing autographs left and right. The Christmas season was a busy one, and as a result, the closed ward was fuller than he had ever seen it. Already there had been three visitors, but despite this, Gilderoy had an ensuing, annoyingly pervasive feeling of loneliness.

Gilderoy had not had any visitors to speak of before, but he supposed it hadn't bothered him much because he hadn't been in a condition to give much thought to it. Now that he was, he began to wonder if he had known anyone, had them talk, smile, laugh with him when he was normal, before the Accident. Maybe no one remembered him.

_But that couldn't be true_, his mind reasoned. He had received letters. More letters than he could read in one night, and some that he gave up on in frustration because he just couldn't understand what they all were talking about. They. Yes, there were a lot of them. His fans.

As Gilderoy sat moodily, staring across at the beds opposite him, and their occupants as well as the visitors that some had. A man that Elleyne called Danny had two visitors who looked like friends. Gilderoy couldn't understand; how could he have so many fans yet no friends at all?

Gilderoy's brain was in overload with all his questions about a life which had once seemed so simple, but was now turning out to be filled with hidden complications and mysteries of a past he didn't even remember. And what was worse, Elleyne was not here today. She was the only one of the Healers who would take a dozen of his autographs with a smile before she told him thanks, but she had enough now.

Gilderoy watched as Danny's visitors gave him some sort of joint Christmas present. He tried to thank them but all he could do was squawk, sounding like a turkey being strangled. The visitors to the Longbottoms had still not emerged from behind the curtain at the end of the ward. He had seen them come in, a stern, tall old woman with a hat topped with a stuffed bird, and a chubby kid who looked extremely glum. The woman had been walking too fast for the kid to catch up easily.

Gilderoy watched the curtain for a while longer, until he became distracted by the sound of Healer Strout, who was wearing a tinsel wreath in her hair and coming in from the hallway outside, a load of presents in her arms. For some reason, this peaked Gilderoy's interests. He was terribly bored, and as he wondered what was outside, he felt excitement boiling in the pit of his stomach. Healer Strout was looking the other way, holding the door open with her foot, while taking a present off of the top of the precariously stacked pile and handing it to the person in the nearest bed. It was the perfect opportunity. It would probably never happen again.

Holding his breath, Gilderoy shot up from his bed, getting a strong headrush as he did so, and snuck out the door and down the hall a ways. A few seconds later he heard the door _snick _shut again. He had a random thought about what he would do if he couldn't get back in, but it was quickly devoured by excitement.

It was colder out here in the hallway than in the room he had just left, and Gilderoy shivered in his sparse lilac dressing gown. The hall was long and white, and Gilderoy walked for a while without this changing much. When he had come quite a ways, one old man in a portrait stopped him with a suspicious and stern note to his voice.

"And where do you think you're off to, young man?"

"I'm exploring!"

"Are you quite sure you should be doing that? You don't appear very stable."

Gilderoy shrugged, then thought of something. "Would you like an autograph?" he asked the portrait eagerly.

"That's the silliest thing I've ever heard. What need would _I_ have of an autograph? I don't even know who you are. You're _certainly_ unstable."

Gilderoy felt a bit disappointed, but persisted on his quest down the hall, leaving the old man in the portrait mumbling about "delusions of grandeur".

Soon Gilderoy came to a set of double doors with a small window set into them. He looked through it and saw what looked like a set of stairs going downwards, nearby. As he watched, a boy came out onto the landing. The boy had messy black hair and glasses. Behind him came three others, a boy and a girl with red hair who looked like brother and sister, and another girl with brown bushy hair. Gilderoy wondered if they were more visitors, or if they lived here as well.

That's when he noticed that the boy with glasses had stopped talking to his companions, and was looking _directly at him_. The redheaded boy and the girl with the brown hair also looked at him, and started to move their mouths in what looked like shock, but Gilderoy couldn't hear what they were saying from this side of the door. He pushed it open and came out to stand in front of them.

"Well, hello there!" he told them in what he believed was a good voice for welcoming visitors. "I expect you'd like my autograph, would you?"

After the portrait's rejection, he felt he deserved a good turn this time.

The boy with glasses didn't say anything right away, but muttered something to the redheaded girl next to him. Gilderoy thought that was a bit rude, but he ignored it, waiting for an answer.

The redheaded boy asked him how he was. Gilderoy grinned. It felt so great to be talking to new people!

"I'm very well indeed, thank you! Now, how many autographs would you like? I can do joined-up writing now, you know!" He dug around in his pocket for a minute before retrieving his favorite quill, and looked up at them again. They were an oddly silent bunch.

The redheaded boy told Gilderoy that they didn't want autographs. Gilderoy didn't plan to listen to him. He needed to get some autographing business done today!

The boy with the glasses finally spoke to him, nervously.

"Professor, should you be wandering around the corridors? Shouldn't you be in a ward?"

Really, what was with everyone asking that? Gilderoy turned back to the boy, and noticed for the first time the jagged, lightning shaped scar on his forehead. He stared at it, something straining in the back of his head. He had the odd feeling that he had seen it before, somewhere.

"Haven't we met?" he asked slowly, almost afraid of the answer.

The boy looked deliberating.

"Er…yeah, we have. You used to teach us at Hogwarts, remember?"

Gilderoy was struck by the information he had just received. He paused to gather breath, and then gasped, "Teach?" He let out his breath slowly, letting his puzzlement have full reign. "Me? Did I?"

When no one said anything, Gilderoy began to feel strangely out of place standing in front of these people. The boy with the scar, he had _taught_ the boy with the scar. It was incomprehensible. Take that with the letters, and he couldn't fit two and two together to make sense. Gilderoy decided it was high time to steer away from the subject.

"Taught you everything you know, I expect, did I?" he said laughingly. "Well, how about those autographs, then? Shall we say a round dozen, you can give them to all your little friends then and nobody will be left out!"

They still looked rather unenthusiastic. Was it possible that they just didn't understand HOW good at joined-up writing Gilderoy had become? Or how _wonderful _his autograph looked at the bottom of his picture, written at a bit of a slant?

Just then, the door came open behind him, and he heard the voice of Healer Strout issue out of it.

"Oh, Gilderoy, you've got visitors! How _lovely,_ and on Christmas Day too! Do you know, he _never _gets visitors, poor lamb, and I can't think why, he's such a sweetie, aren't you?"

That was the problem with Strout, Gilderoy thought. She really did give out too much information. He was, however, extremely happy that he hadn't been chided badly at all for his daring escape.

Healer Strout made her way over to the group of people on the landing, and beamed around at them all.

"We're doing autographs!" Gilderoy told her, flourishing his quill to make the point quite clear. "They want loads of them, won't take no for an answer! I just hope we've got enough photographs!"

And he did. He really did. He was getting awfully excited about going back to sign them all. Anything to stop looking at the scarred boy, actually. He was making Gilderoy sweat.

Strout took Gilderoy's arm and smiled at him like he was her own son.

"Listen to him," she said.

It half creeped him out, but it half made him extremely comfortable as well, the way she was so motherly.

Gilderoy remained standing, while Healer Strout babbled to the visitors about how she was so glad he had visitors and all of that. Then finally, he let himself be steered up the corridor again, into the ward from whence he had came, and all the way to the chair beside his bed. Gilderoy leaned forward to where a pile of photographs lay await on his bed, raked them in towards him, took out a quill and began to sign.

Gilderoy hardly looked up as he signed, and then only briefly as he tossed the letters at the red haired girl, who was closest to him, so that she could put them in envelopes. Envelopes dried out Gilderoy's tongue, and he could never get them to stick all the way.

"I am not forgotten, you know, no, I still receive a very great deal of fan mail….Gladys Gudgeon writes _weekly_…I just wish I knew _why_…"

The red haired girl didn't give him any hints, and neither did anyone else. Gilderoy looked at the photograph he was holding and grinned.

"I suspect it is simply my good looks…" And without another thought, he went back to signing.

It was only in the heat of doing something like this, repeatedly signing his name on pictures of himself, that Gilderoy, who did not really know who he was at all, was able to feel as if maybe in a smaller sense, a more unconscious, general sense, he did, or would. For when you don't know who you are, he thought, you often must need something to hold on to, and a name was something.

So Gilderoy was surprised when he looked up what seemed like ten minutes, but was really close to an hour later, and noticed that all the pictures he had thrown into the red haired girl's lap were still sitting there, forlornly. Some were even at her feet, as she stared with rapt attention and interest at the boy with the scar and his friends, intent on what they were saying.

"Look, I didn't learn joined-up writing for nothing, you know!"

It was silent for a moment.

Then the red haired boy said something about having to go, each of the kids took an autograph, and they left. Strout met them near the door and escorted them for a ways. When she got back to Gilderoy, he was feeling moody again.

"Now don't look at me that way, Gilderoy," she clucked at him cheerily, plumping his pillow absentmindedly as she scurried around. "You've just had visitors!"

But, he thought as she bustled away, he was fairly certain that the people he had met, even the strange boy with the scar, had not been _his _visitors.

Gilderoy hung the remaining autographs he had written (37 in all) around his bed. At night they waved, smiled with their dazzling teeth, and winked at him in a most charming way.

It was like a fifty visitors, all for him, all standing by. Sort of like friends.


	9. a saving lie

Elleyne came to work late on December 27th. She had been disturbed by the news that morning. A girl had died, apparently from falling down her stairs, but there was no exact proof. It was all very strange. Perhaps a murder, Elleyne thought as she pocketed her wand, checking the time on the wall. The scary thing about accidents like that were that they could happen to anyone. It could've been one of Elleyne's neighbors. Hell, it could have been _her. _

Elleyne walked into St. Mungo's with slight apprehension. Thirty-five minutes late. Josh Brodyn would _kill_ her. And her expectations were not disappointed, she found as she ran into him in the corridor outside of the Spell Damage corridor.

"Elleyne!" Brodyn exclaimed, dropping a pitiful stack of papers and bending to pick them up almost simultaneously.

"Scare you, did I?" she grinned.

Josh didn't take the humor in stride. Big surprise.

"You wouldn't have scared me had you been _on time,_" he puffed testily.

Elleyne didn't think this particularly fair. Others had been late far more often than herself; it seemed that being the only healer who was both young and single made Josh think that she had nothing better to do, nothing to detain her from her duties.

And she found herself wishing, more and more often, that she did. But that was beside the point.

"Just…just be on time," Josh finished rather lamely, levitating his papers once he had organized them, seemingly under the impression that they would suffer less harm this way.

Elleyne nodded, and walked down the disconcertingly white hallway and to the door of the closed ward. It had been a long time since she'd seen Gilderoy, and she was eager to check on his progress. She was unusually impatient for the young former celebrity to regain his memory, and had to admit that she might have been acting a bit unfairly to the other patients over the last couple of months.

Stepping through the doorway of the closed ward, Elleyne looked around and immediately spotted Gilderoy. He was sitting at the wooden desk where he had learned to write and read. As she came up behind him, Elleyne saw that he was experimenting with and practicing flourishes on his now very impressive and much-practiced autographs. He looked up as she came to stand beside him.

"Hi, Roy," she said, smiling at the nickname he had insisted she use from henceforth.

Gilderoy grinned hugely. "You remembered!"

"Of course I remembered, silly. How was Christmas in the old cell?"

Gilderoy shrugged, looking down for a second. "Okay. I didn't get to hand out as many of these as I'd have liked to," he said, waving a hand toward the autograph.

Elleyne had the feeling that there might be something Gilderoy wasn't telling her, but she left off for the time being, despite her curiosity.

Then, randomly, Gilderoy spoke again, in a tone of wonderment and mystery.

"I was a _teacher_," he breathed.

Elleyne was shocked. "A teacher?"

She couldn't remember ever hearing about Gilderoy in any position of the like, and wondered if this was some sort of dream he had had.

"Yes," Gilderoy confirmed, sounding very certain. "I was a teacher, and I taught the boy with the scar. Why, I probably taught him all the tricks in the book!" He flashed another quick grin.

"But…Roy…" Elleyne began. She wasn't sure what to say to this. Then, "Hold a minute. Who's this boy with the scar?"

This time Gilderoy hesitated.

"I…I had visitors. For the first time, except…except they weren't really mine, I don't think. Maybe the boy was, at least. He said I _taught _him, you know…the boy with the scar did, that is. But then the other boy said they didn't need autographs. He was probably just being modest…but yes, the boy with the scar, he came with his friends, he had lots of them….I wish I had lots of friends."

Elleyne, who had been about to say something, was frozen by these words. She didn't know quite what to say to this. An awkward silence passed, then Gilderoy said, "He was familiar, too, that boy, the one with the scar. I've known him. I'm sure I have."

Elleyne thought. "What kind of scar did this boy have, Roy?" she asked.

"It was on his forehead, and long and jagged. It was pretty easy to see. Why?"

_Oh gods, _Elleyne thought, _Harry Potter? Did _Harry Potter _really visit Gilderoy? _

"Hmm…I don't know, Roy. Not really. Ergh, I'm so absentminded today!" she groaned. "I'm sorry."

"No, it's okay. I know the feeling."

They had a good laugh over that one.

It was later in the afternoon when Gilderoy said, "I must've done a lot of great things in the past, you know."

Elleyne looked up from a brief report she was writing on Henry, the squawking wonder.

"In my mail there were many enlightening letters. I don't know what half the things I fought were, but I've done some pretty impressive things! I hardly know how I had the time!"

"Well, you wrote books about everything you did, actually. I'm sure you got that from the letters. I also think you may have added some fiction to the facts, just to make things more interesting. Some people just don't understand the difference. You know what I mean, right?"

Gilderoy looked mystified.

"Never mind. You were a good, admirable person, though. That's the important part."

And there it was. It was the first time Elleyne had lied to Gilderoy, and she wondered why she'd done it. She had been one of the few young but not-so-impressionable witches that had not been excited at Gilderoy Lockhart's charm, a few years back when he was all the rage. "He's just a pretty face," she could remember thinking with disgust "and his books are all lies, the lot of them." Still, she had been a bit surprised to realize just how right she had been. Her sister Laura, as well as a few of her friends, had had to deal with her teasing for a staggering amount of time. They had been besotted with the fraudulent rogue, but Elleyne had been sure that she would never like anything about Gilderoy Lockhart.

So what had made her lie? For one, she did like Gilderoy. How could she not, when he was, after all, almost as innocent as a child? You had to have a great amount of sympathy for anyone who had suffered a total Obliviation. But it was more than that, and she knew it.

Gilderoy had a chance of being a considerate, fine person, and Elleyne wasn't sure that the truth of what he had been would be a good thing to know at all. For this reason, she half wished he wouldn't regain his memory. With the memory, vestiges of his old personality would surely come back to Gilderoy. She knew that it was part of the recovery process, and that she should be glad of it, but…

But what?

_You lied._

Later, as Elleyne gave over the night shift to Healer Loell and apparated to the ground floor of the building, and still _later, _as she sat awake in front of the fire in her small, sometimes lonely but always comfortable house, she thought about what she had done, trying to find justification.

_I made him feel good about himself; that's all that should matter._

_But it's not all that matters, and you know it, Elleyne. You lied to a patient! You're supposed to have their trust. _

_I didn't want him to know the horrible truth!_

_So you shouldn't have told him anything, now should you? That's not your job. Your job is to help them recover, and telling him things isn't going to make him _remember _them. You should know from your training; with cases like his, all you can do is hand him cues and hope that he will start to remember. Telling stories, good or bad, will not help if he doesn't recognize them. _

Elleyne knew this was true. And then there was the fact that she would be in enormous trouble if Brodyn ever found out that she'd been telling anything to Gilderoy. Or that she'd given him his mail. The mail would surely endanger her job, if anyone found out she had given it to him. But she had been careful to only let him peruse it during the 24 hour shift that belonged purely to her.

_But still, they might find out._

_I don't care. It was worth it._

And it was.

_But you still lied to him._

…


	10. the key to everything

**a/n: I am VERY sorry that I'm so bad at keeping to my stories. I have oft-heard from my good friend, hence named Padfoot, that she forgets what my stories are even about by the time I get over myself and update them. (though maybe this isn't so reliable, as I have reason to doubt her memory skills to begin with ahemangstysnapeficahem) Shutting up.**

Her arms moved up, down, round and round as she spun in the rays of light that bathed her mysteriously from the heavens above. Her dark brown hair rippled out behind her, whipping crazily about her head. Crazily, beautifully. Beautifully, crazily. Then the girl in the yellow dress tripped over a rock clumsily and fell, laughing before she hit the ground with a loud "Mmph!"

"See, dancing's not bad at all, Roy!" she called, laughing again, all the time laughing. The boy with the wavy blond hair and the forget-me-not blue eyes smiled shyly, and declined the cleverly hidden invitation.

"That was more twirling without control than dancing, besides," he said, smiling a bit. His cheeks felt hot. Why these feelings, these feelings now? He had known her five years. Five years! He was twelve, and he was feeling odd…

And now the boy was sixteen, and she was walking beside him, walking walking walking through the halls of the mansion, her hand in his so they didn't lose each other in the dark. Their excitement was tangible, the kind when you're doing something you shouldn't. They were almost to the place, and for the first time she would see what he thought…

The blond boy hit a cold, stone ground, and started to cry out, but stopped himself. It's cold, cold here, and the words were in his head, the words _he _spoke. And the boy felt fear, but something else too…he felt freedom, and loss. Loss and freedom. He knew he had to do something, something to get everything back…something to get her…

Elleyne stood by Gilderoy, watching his breath in his sleep, and she wondered what it was that he dreamed after all. She had come to work early, though not by much. All the same, Brodyn was pleased. Good, let him be.

Gilderoy twitched, and Elleyne looked down. He hadn't needed his sleeping draught for a while, supposedly because he had stopped having the dreams. But Elleyne had a strong suspicion that he had them anyway, and either wasn't disturbed by them, or didn't tell anyone.

Gilderoy's eyes snapped open, so suddenly that Elleyne jumped a bit. He seemed not to know where he was at first, sitting up, blinking, and then lying down again. Finally, he appeared to grasp his senses again, and noticed her there.

"Have you been dreaming again?" she asked.

"You remind me of someone…" Gilderoy murmured. She supposed he still wasn't completely conscious. She put a hand on his shoulder gently, and he seemed to see her anew.

"Oh yes, hello!" he said, smiling the slightest bit. Elleyne repeated her question.

"No, no. Well, yes…but…but they're very clear dreams, you know…Ad Loell, she once told me that dreams _could _be clear like that. But she doesn't understand how…personal they are. I think…Elleyne, you know what I think?" His voice was a confusing mass of excitement and apprehension.

"What do you think, Roy?" she asked, waiting patiently for him to come to.

"I think…I think they're memories, that's what I think!"

Elleyne wasn't expecting this.

"Yes!" Gilderoy said, louder than was necessary, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his rumpled lilac dressing gown and leaned forward with a crazy light in his blue eyes.

"Memories," he stated, seeming to enjoy the sound of the word.

Elleyne knew she should be doubting his mental stability, and part of her was; but the greater part of her wanted to know more.

"What have you been dreaming…or, remembering? Is there anything you know about yourself?"

Gilderoy became quiet, sort of subdued, even. "Yes, but there are so many things I don't know…it's not very clear."

"What _do _you know?" Elleyne's heart rate had sped up in spite of herself. She knew that she would believe him now, no matter how ridiculous anything he would say might sound. She found herself once again stepping out of her role as a Healer, and into the role of Elleyne Anderson, who was sincerely interested in the person in front of her. What Gilderoy had to share might be something no one had ever known; after all, all he had done during his time as a celebrity was lie.

Gilderoy's face took on an uncharacteristic shadow. "I remember him," he said, "And I wish I didn't. I don't really understand him, except that I was scared of him, and I still am." His voice had diminished to a whisper.

"Who is he?" Elleyne pressed gently.

"I don't know."

"Okay, okay…remember anything a bit more pleasant?"

A pause came, heavy and still. And then---

"I liked to paint, I remember that. No, actually I loved it. I liked to draw, too. First, actually. And then I started to paint. I was really young, and I wanted to be an artist. But I don't think I ever was…" He looked troubled.

Elleyne didn't question him any further.

"There was one more thing!" he said. "There was someone….someone who…I think that if I found her I could understand everything. All I can remember came back to me through dreams, and that's all I have. Nothing is…" He jerked his hand out of his pocket, and waved it in frustration.

"Nothing triggers anything else," Elleyne whispered.

"Yeah. Yeah, that." She could tell he didn't really understand what she meant, but she had caught a glimpse in her mind's eye of what it might be like to experience this phenomena, and she didn't need anyone to tell her how uneasy it could make someone feel.

"All these snatches of memory, and nothing to glue them together. Right, Roy?"

"Yes! Yes!" His mouth transformed from a frown to one of his prize-winning grins. Those grins were worth even a dip in her pay.

"You keep remembering to call me Roy."

"Yes, I do. I won't forget. Now, were you talking about someone who could help you with your memory?" Elleyne prompted, feeling a bit like a psychiatrist.

"Did I say that?" He was lost in thought for a moment. "Oh yes. There is someone, and…she…"

"She's a woman," Elleyne said helpfully.

"No, she's a girl."

"Well, she'll likely have grown up a bit…"

"She's the key to everything," Gilderoy said, falling back on his bed and staring at the ceiling. He seemed completely in awe of an invisible something in the air.

Elleyne was skeptical, but intrigued all the same.

"Do you remember her name?"

"No," Gilderoy breathed, still staring at the ceiling. "She had brown hair though. It was a good shade of brown."

"Roy…you're talking silly now. How can we possibly find someone if all we know about them is that they're a female with brown hair!"

Gilderoy sat up. "You're going to _find her_?"

"Well…I didn't say that."

But at the end of the day, Elleyne requested two days off. Brodyn was not amused.

"Why?"

"Family matters."

"What's the matter with your family, Anderson? You never talk about them."

"My mother is not feeling well," Elleyne said, using the darkest tone she could muster. Brodyn flinched back from her.

"Alright, alright. You can have a day…"

"Two."

"…."

"She's very ill."

"Fine, two," Brodyn snapped.

"Thank you," Elleyne said. She had some major research ahead of her.


	11. chasing shadows

**a/n: (furious dancing ensues) Yes, I have started school again. BUT! I have also updated…again. Laugh with me now, I'm happy. Oh, and thank the king-size Kit-Kat bar I've just consumed for the inspiration for this chapter : ) **

Elleyne sat at the mahogany desk in her basement, pulling Automatic Update reference books of the modern wizarding world (AURBMWW, the abbreviation could kill you) out of a nearby shelf.

Lockhart, Lockhart, Lockhart…there were certainly a lot of references to Gilderoy himself. She looked at all of them, but most only said things about his books, his deepest desire (peace between wizards and other creatures, she doubted that had been it), and some abstract and thoroughly petty things like his favorite color. Never did it mention any people relations.

Giving up on the reference books, Elleyne took a break for some kippers and toast, and in a last desperate thought, began to flip through her copy of the Floo Network listings for the area. There were 9 Lockharts. Not as bad as it could be…but gods, you'd think if someone was related to Gilderoy, they would've come forward and said so, tried to get in on the money. She was beginning to think that there was a freak chance that Gilderoy had no living relatives.

Elleyne looked at the names of the 9 Lockharts…there was just no way of telling. Gilderoy himself was (albeit rather obviously) unlisted. Giving a great groan of frustration, Elleyne rubbed her eyes. It was 11 o' clock in the morning, she couldn't be expected to think clearly. For someone who was formerly one of the most famous wizards the world over, Gilderoy's former life was quite a mystery. He didn't even say much about it in his autobiography, _Magical Me_, which Elleyne had bought, only to wonder after skimming it why she was doing this. Gilderoy hinted that his life had been a rags to riches story. Not likely. The man had clearly not labored a day in his life, she could tell by looking at Roy.

After looking through many of Gilderoy's works, there came to be two Lockharts residing in Elleyne's mind. The insufferable, vain one from whom she had to seed out the almost nonexistent truth he may have uttered, that was Gilderoy. Then there was Roy, the childish man with the identification crisis and the light blue eyes and smile that were constantly grinning.

Then there was the lurking worry that the latter would become the former.

Elleyne flipped through her contacts, looking for something, anyone who would know anything. Her hand paused on the paper with Poppy Pomfrey's address on it. Poppy wouldn't be home right now, by now she would be back at Hogwarts where she served as nurse. She doubted Poppy would know anything about Roy's past, but was it possible that Albus Dumbledore would? Even if he did, she would feel out of place just coming through

Hogsmeade and up the path to Hogwarts uninvited, inquiring about something like that. But she might just have to.

"Miss Anderson, it's been a long time," Albus Dumbledore smiled at her, his light blue eyes twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles.

Once she saw the man, Elleyne's fears of seeming out of place here were completely vanished. It was as if she were still the plodding yet mischievous young girl she had been about…well, it was only eight years ago that she had attended here. It had seemed like so much longer, but now…now it seemed like only last week.

"And to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" Dumbledore inquired. They were sitting in his office, a plate of lemon tarts and fudge between them, courtesy of the house elves. Elleyne had been in this office on a couple of occasions during her stay at Hogwarts, none of them serious offences, and none of which Dumbledore had treated very seriously either. Maybe because she was in Gryffindor…Dumbledore always seemed to favor that house

"Well, as you may know sir, I've become a Healer at St. Mungo's Hospital, and I'm here on account of one of my patients."

"Ah," Dumbledore said. "Gilderoy Lockhart, by any chance?"

"H-how did you know?" Elleyne sputtered, sounding like a first class idiot. She stuffed a lemon tart into her mouth to plug it up.

"Lucky guess. Several of your patients may have been students here, but he is the only one who has taught here. How have you been keeping yourself?"

The question caught Elleyne unawares. She quickly swallowed her tart.

"How am I? I'm just fine…why?"

Dumbledore just smiled, and hummed something briefly under his breath. She felt slightly annoyed for some vague reason.

"What would you like to know about Gilderoy?"

"It's actually about—his past. Before Hogwarts, or during, or whatever. When he was a student. Who were his parents?"

"Parent. His mother did not bring him up."

"Oh. How did she die?"

A pause.

"They said she fell down the stairs."

Elleyne's mind flashed to the news a couple of days ago, the news of a girl dying…_from falling down the stairs at the front of her house._ Inwardly, she felt chilled.

"You don't believe that, sir?"

This time, there was only a bit of a pause before Dumbledore answered, "No. I don't."

There was a long silence before he said "No, it was Gilderoy's father, Nerolinus Lockhart, who raised him. I confess to not knowing much else about his childhood. When Gilderoy came to this school, he was a rather insecure, quiet boy. A couple of times, he was the victim of bullying from older students, but I don't believe he was a regular target."

"Do you happen to know who any of his friends were?"

Dumbledore looked thoughtful for a second, then said, "Would you forgive me if I said I didn't remember?"

"No, that's okay. But…the thing is, Gilderoy has been getting his memory back by way of _dreams_."

Dumbledore raised his eyebrows. "That is interesting."

"I thought so. But they're only flashbulb memories, and they may be scattered. He remembers certain things happening, but doesn't remember the reason for them, the stories behind events in his life."

"So what he needs is a trigger of some kind."

"Right. I'm hoping that if I find out enough…personal information, he will remember the rest."

"That may be a high order."

Elleyne sighed. "Don't I know it."

Dumbledore peered at her closely. "I doubt whether you're supposed to be doing it either."

Elleyne had no answer for that.

"Do you know where his father lives?" she asked, after a time.

"That I can tell you, though he has tried to stay hidden rather well, ever since the fame of his son hit the world."

She didn't have much time to think about this, before Dumbledore had given her the needed information. She turned to go, and looked back at him on the way.

"Thank you, sir," she said, thinking that there was more she could say, but not saying it.

Dumbledore just gave her another intense, sparkling look over the top of his spectacles. When she had turned again and started through the door, he spoke.

"Good luck, Miss Anderson. I hope you get what you're looking for."


	12. entering the hidden

**Disclaimer: I don't own the stuff in italics in the beginning, that's all situations from the Chamber of Secrets book…yes, I was actually looking at it while writing that part. Shut up. Also, I obviously don't own Gilderoy Lockhart. I do, however, own Elleyne Anderson. Other than that, I was really happy with this chapter.**

Gilderoy edged down the dimly lit hallway, hardly daring to breathe, feeling her next to him, astounded at himself but knowing it would be worth it when she saw…

_A great crowd of awed and inspired onlookers swayed in front of the blond young man, and he was speaking to them, excitement pumping through his veins at the thought of where he was, what he was doing. Excitement and also fear._

"_Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have great pleasure and pride in announcing that this September, I will be taking up the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!" _

_The crowd went wild._

A sound echoed from behind the two teenagers in the ornately carved hallway, and Gilderoy turned to the girl next to him. He could feel her confusion, palpable in the darkness, but he had no time to explain. He pushed open a door to his left and ushered her in quickly…then waited.

"I have found something that disappoints me gravely, Gilderoy…"

"_But when I was twelve, I was just as much of a nobody as you are now. In fact, I'd say I was even more of a nobody!"_

_He stared down smilingly at the young boy with the black messy hair and the glasses. Harry Potter, the boy who lived. _

The clock struck two a.m. from the lower level of the mansion. One, two. Gilderoy forced himself to stare into the shadows that was the face of the monster in front of him. Already he knew how this would end. But he didn't care. Because this time he wouldn't run. This time he would fight.

"_Fame's a fickle friend, Harry. Celebrity is as celebrity does, remember that."_

_The candles in front of him flickered and guttered, blurring the image of the bespectacled boy, sitting across from him, writing wearily._

Gilderoy hit the cold stone with the feeling that all of his bones had just shattered. He had been pondering this moment, he realized, for a long time. And now it had come. He felt shattered in a way that was completely non-physical.

He lay on the ground staring up at the soulless night sky, and wondered what there had ever been to paint. In a world like this…

He had lost the fire. But he would get it back, he thought with a sudden vengeance. He would get her back.

----------------------------------------

Gilderoy stared up at the shadowy ceiling of the ward, sweating profusely and trying to calm his racing heart. There would be no more sleep tonight. And almost randomly, as if it made a difference, he wished Elleyne were there.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elleyne took a deep breath as she stared up at the huge, black door. The mansion and the landscape around it, (filled with large, forbidding trees which reached out to entangle you in their branches if you got too close) was certainly designed to keep unwelcome guests away. And here, anyone would be labeled as such.

Elleyne had suffered a great deal of frustration in order to even _find _the house in the first place. Now that she was here, she was starting to wish she hadn't.

Forcing down the instinctual dread that had roiled up in the pit of her stomach, Elleyne knocked on the door loudly, twice. Her knuckles smarting, she pulled back and waited, trying to convince herself that it was ridiculous to be feeling mortal dread at the concept of meeting some crotchety old man.

After a couple of minutes, Elleyne decided that no one had heard her knock, and was in mid-reach for the door, when it swung open, crushing two of her fingers.

Trying to keep from swearing, she squinted into the darkness, looking for any recognizable shape and finding none.

"Miss can come in now," a squeaky voice sounded from below, and startled, Elleyne looked down to see a house elf standing in the shadow of the door, wearing what looked like a dishrag.

Elleyne entered the house, clutching the pamphlets of medical information she had brought on Roy to her chest, and followed the house elf through a large, shadowed hallway and up a set of spiral stairs, into a type of sitting room. At first Elleyne was unable to see anyone in the room, and was about to ask the house elf about it, when a stern, hard voice came from the corner of the room.

"Leave us, Perry."

The house elf immediately scurried away, not before bowing deeply at something behind Elleyne.

Wheeling about rather awkwardly, Elleyne got her first look at Roy's father. Tall and thin yet well-muscled, with a lined face and sleek blond hair, Lockhart senior didn't exactly look like the inviting type. His cold, pale eyes looked her over, and he came from the edge of the room to sit stiffly on the one long couch available. Elleyne gathered that he was going to leave her standing.

"How did you find out about this place?" Nerolinus Lockhart demanded quietly. He had a strong voice, and Elleyne hated to admit it, but she felt intimidated.

"Albus Dumbledore told me how to get past the concealment charm," she said.

Lockhart narrowed his eyes for a second, before speaking. "It must be very important, what you have to say," he said, in a tone that suggested he highly doubted anything she would say could be of any importance.

"Yes, it is," Elleyne said pointedly. "I am Elleyne Anderson, a Healer at St. Mungo's Hospital, and I have been put in charge of Gilderoy."

"Gilderoy."

"Yes, Gilderoy. Your son." Lockhart made no comment, and Elleyne took the opportunity to make the plunge.

"Recently, Gilderoy has been having what may just be dreams of his past. He's been trying to regain his memory since the Obliviation, and it's been tough going. Well, here are the records, you can see for yourself…"

Elleyne handed the pamphlets she was holding to Lockhart, who opened the topmost one, glanced at the paper inside with indifference and handed it back to her.

"If there is anything you can think of that might trigger his memory-

"It is regrettable, this memory loss, but there is nothing I can do about it," Lockhart said abruptly, cutting her off.

Elleyne felt her anger rising to the surface.

"Well then, I hope you won't mind my asking some questions. What was Gilderoy like as a child?"

"Like any other child. What is there to say?" Lockhart said shortly. "A bit lazier than most, infatuated with the girl across the street."

"What was her name?" Elleyne asked, taking a quill from the pocket of her robes.

Lockhart stared at her hard, before replying.

"Reid is their surname, they still live across the street. But I wouldn't waste time looking for the girl, she's died. Now if _you _don't mind, I would like to cut this meeting short. I have things to attend to."

Elleyne stared across at him in silence, fury pounding through her head.

"Perry!" Lockhart called, shifting his gaze from her for a moment. The house elf came bustling into the room, and he stood up. "Show our 'important guest' out of the house," he ordered.

Elleyne didn't move.

"Tell me," she said coldly "how did your wife die?"

In a violent, knee-jerk reaction, Lockhart senior lurched forward, his hand going to his wand, his face hardened with fury. Then, all at once he stopped, his hand dropping back along his side, and smiled icily.

"I think your visit is at an end, Healer Anderson," he said.

The danger in his voice did not go unheeded, and as Elleyne left the mansion and went out into the chilly outdoor air, she wondered at what exactly had made her say what she had.

_It doesn't matter, _she thought, as she stared across the street from the now invisible mansion at a plain, white house, a bit run down. _I have what I need._


	13. desperate quiet of the soul

**a/n: Ahh, recovering from sickness inspires thought, and thought inspires writing. But not the newspaper article and college essay writing that has been my life for the past couple weeks. Bhe. Enjoy **

Gilderoy remained staring up at the ceiling into the wee hours of the day. Healer Strout kept shooting him worried glances and making tutting noises. The patient in the bed nearest him had a visitor, who was quite loud and obnoxious. But to Gilderoy, none of this existed. He kept staring at the same yellow stain on the ceiling, following its form with his eyes, trying to understand something inside of his mind which he knew he never could. And then a thought occurred to him, unbidden and chilling at once.

Was he crazy?

Gilderoy shivered and shifted just slightly on the starched white sheets, never taking his eyes from the place where the stain stood, like a statement of a mystery, something that might not even exist. And the longer he stared at the mark, the longer Gilderoy became convinced it didn't exist.

Was he crazy?

Everything up to now, all the dreams, the memories, had they existed? Or were they just figments of Gilderoy's imagination? It was too much for him, and he really wanted to sleep, and he felt as if his head ached from tearing itself apart for so long. Elleyne wasn't here either. Why had he made her go away? Would she ever come back? What if she knew he was crazy, and was only trying to make him happy by searching for a girl who…

No. She existed. She had to exist. The girl. Gilderoy clung desperately to the thought. The girl was real, he was positive of it, and if she were real than the rest could be, and he wasn't crazy.

Was he?

This torment of the mind would've gone on for forever, if Elleyne hadn't burst into the room at the moment. Spotting Gilderoy, she frowned. Something was clearly wrong. But before she could ponder it further, Gilderoy got up and stared at her with uncontained relief in his eyes, which were ringed with dark from lack of sleep.

Gilderoy stared across the room at Elleyne, ignoring the protesting dizziness of his head, which resented the sudden movement. Her robes were blue. He liked blue. A lot.

"You," he said dryly, his voice feeling like a whisper inside his throat. "Back."

Elleyne couldn't define the odd curling inside her chest, or why she couldn't speak for a breadth of time. Instead, she just nodded. And looking at Roy with his tousled blond hair and turquoise bathrobe, she wasn't sure that she should be doing this. But she knew somehow that it didn't matter, because she would.

"Roy," she began, "I-I have something to tell you."

Gilderoy just looked at her, his silence carrying to her an urge to continue.

"I have been—"

_No, don't talk about his father. Not yet. Not now._

"I mean, I have found out about the girl you were talking about earlier. She's…not living anymore. I'm sorry. I don't know exactly who she was to you, but she's gone."

A long silence folded out between them, and still Gilderoy didn't speak. He didn't look like he could.

Healer Strout passed them by, chirping a greeting to Elleyne, completely oblivious to the troubled, tense aura the younger Healer was emitting.

"Her name was Vanessa Reid, and she died on December 23rd. Her apartment remains as it was, as she didn't have any sort of will. She was very young, well, you knew that, like you, that sort of y-"

She broke off when she noticed Gilderoy's expression. At the sound of the name, Gilderoy had ceased to hear Elleyne's words, as he stood in a sort of trance. _Vanessa_, he thought. _Yes, of course._

"I need to go see her!"

"Roy, I told you she's gone," Elleyne said desperately, now looking around to make sure Healer Strout wasn't in hearing distance.

"I need to see the apartment then," Gilderoy said quietly, but firmly.

"Roy, you know that's impossible. You're a patient here…"

"Is that what I am to you?"

"What do you mean by that?" Elleyne's body tensed.

Gilderoy didn't answer. He didn't know what he meant by anything anymore. His mind was in turmoil, and despite the recent news, he had never felt as if he had known less in his life. His mind seemed to be in a constant state of suppression, and it wouldn't let him ponder the implications behind something so intangible as a name. He believed Elleyne's words, but he needed to see it for himself in order to set loose the murmuring beast in the dusty pit of his subconscious. His heart beating fast for no apparent reason, he turned to Elleyne again, and spoke softly this time, but with just as much urgency.

"I'm sorry, but I must see the apartment. I _need _to."

Elleyne, returning from a confused and angry silence, said "I can't do anything about that. It's still technically my off-time. You know it. Don't ask anything else from me."

Gilderoy stared at her, and she realized how cold her words must have sounded only too late.

"Please," he said. That was all, plain and simple, and painfully earnest. Elleyne turned her head away from him.

"I can't."

And she left the room, half-tripping over a chair on the way, but never turning back.

Elleyne passed a few others in the hallways as she went down the many levels to the ground floor. Everyone and everything was a barely recognizable blur, and she treated them with disinterest anyhow, only saying hello when she was saluted by another, never addressing anyone herself. Once she was out in the chilly winter air, Elleyne watched her breath dissipate in front of her a while before snapping to and apparating back home.

* * *

The house was quaint and small, and empty as always, but Elleyne couldn't find comfort in it.

"Damn it all," she muttered to herself, after pacing around her kitchen with a cup of tea in hand until she was dizzy. "Why can't I just bloody relax?"

_Calm down, all right? Really, Elleyne, just do what you normally do. Get a nice book, or magazine, maybe some biscuits, and get a fire going. Calm. Down. And the house is no colder than it ever was._

This last thought surprised her a bit, but now she realized her house _was _cold. It had _never _been this cold, she was sure of it.

"_Incendio_," she said quietly, flicking her wand at the fireplace in the adjoining room. Flames came shooting up from the wood, licking at the brick walls of their prison greedily.

Even when Elleyne had settled into her favorite chair, this week's issue of _Witch Weekly _spread out in front of her, she found herself unable to concentrate.

_So, find something else to do._

_Is there anything else!_

Elleyne let the thought hang in the air for a moment, and then the answer came to her.

_No, not really. How is that possible?_

_Well, I do work a lot. Sweet Merlin, that's all I do…all I do is work, and read magazines that I know are full of meaningless drabble, and read books, eat and sleep. And I haven't seen my sister for two years, or anyone else really, outside of work…_

Elleyne tipped her head back and forced herself to breathe, to think rationally. She'd had a tough day. She was just driving herself insane, it was stupid really…

"_How have you been keeping yourself?" Dumbledore's polite, quiet tone inquired from behind his desk._

"Just fine, just fine," Elleyne whispered under the crackling of the flames.

_The blue eyes just twinkled at her knowingly._

When Elleyne went to bed that night, prepared to go back to work the next day, and slept fine.


	14. that which reason does not know

**a/n: Really, really not much to say. Except I appreciate reviews. Enjoy..!**

When Elleyne next woke, she was extremely tired. It couldn't possibly be…

Staring over at the clock, she blinked twice. 2:00? In the morning? She sighed in disgust. This clock was supposed to work!

Getting up wearily, Elleyne walked over to her alarm clock before stopping and staring at it. It was supposed to wake her up at the time that would be best for her. Many a time had the clock saved her from sleeping in and being late for work, and many a time she had thought of replacing it with a Muggle clock for the sheer annoyance of not being able to fool the thing. 2 a.m.! There was just no sense in it.

Elleyne pawed her eyes blearily, and stumbled back to bed, trying to put a few more hours of sleep into her night.

The time that would be best for her, the wizard selling the clock to her must've been taking the mickey…Time that would be best for her…

Elleyne sat upright so quickly it made her head dizzy for a spell, and she had to lay down again for a second. Lying wide awake now in bed, she felt scared out of her mind by what had just entered it.

"No," she muttered to herself, "No, no. You're crazy. Elleyne, you're a deranged lunatic. No, no you're not. You just need to calm down, gain perspective. Take that back, you're talking to yourself. Trademark lunatic."

Elleyne sat there on her four poster bed trembling until her breathing became calm once more, her composure completely regained. Getting up, she got dressed quickly.

_No time to lose, no time to lose_.

Apparating to a Muggle shopping complex, Elleyne crossed the street to a dusty old shop called Purge and Dowse Ltd's. It was still very dark and there was no one in the immediate area…no one to see her vanish through the glass of the display window.

St. Mungo's was quiet, a drastic change from the usual flow of the daytime. Doris, the witch who normally took the night shift at the Inquiries counter, was hunched over a cheap romance novel, reading in the dim light from her wand. She didn't appear to have noticed Elleyne's arrival, engrossed as she was in her book.

Elleyne only took a moment to be surprised at the complete lack of people aside from Doris. Even though it was 2:30 in the morning, it seemed there were always at least five people in the room, whether they were Healers or waiting patients. Again the words _best time for you_ echoed in her head as she quietly crossed the room and started up to the fourth level.

On the landing of the second floor, she almost ran into some sort of trainee Healer, who ignored her as he brushed past. She passed a couple of other people, none of whom she knew well enough to worry about them knowing this wasn't her shift.

Finally reaching the familiar door marked Spell Damage, opened it and walked down the corridor, her pace quickening until she reached the door of the closed ward, by which she stopped and leaned against the wall. The impact of what she was about to do had just hit her again.

_Oh gods, what am I doing? I'm about to steal a patient from the hospital I work at, if I get caught I'll be fired at best. _

Elleyne straightened up, remembering that she was already in danger of being fired if anyone found out about what she had done already. She had not only taken Gilderoy's hospital records out of the building and shared them with someone unapproved, but she had given him his mail and other illegal information. Everything she was doing was illegal, what did it matter now?

Not allowing herself to think any longer, Elleyne acted quickly, pushing the door to the ward open and coming down through the first row of beds slowly. Healer Loell, who was finished in the process of giving the wizard in Bode's old bed (he had been devoured by a trick plant a month earlier, making the news) some sort of potion, turned and smiled at Elleyne, looking puzzled.

"Hello, Ad," Elleyne said pleasantly, letting her eyes roam over to Gilderoy's bed before she looked at Adalone.

"Elleyne!" her colleague exclaimed in a hushed voice. "What're you doing here now?"

"I'm coming in early. Couldn't sleep for the life of me. Don't you get in over your head working this shift alone?"

Ad laughed. "Not really. I mean, sometimes, but it's not bad. It's really a one-man job at night. One-woman, that is."

"If you like," said Elleyne, thinking fast, "I could take the rest of your shift for you."

"Oh, I couldn't do that."

"How much longer are you on? Three hours? I've just had a couple of days off, see, and crazy as it is, I sort of miss this. You look about to drop dead."

Ad snorted, but nodded all the same. "You serious?"

Elleyne nodded.

Ad got a bit more excited looking. "Alright. You've worked here longer than me, so I don't need to tell you anything. Just…I don't want you to regret it."

"Like I said, I've sort of missed it," Elleyne shrugged.

Ad smiled, turned to go, and turned back again, coming in close to Elleyne.

"I know what you mean, by the way," she told her, like she was confiding a big secret to a close friend. "You know, it's supposed to be professional and all, but sometimes you can't help having favorites in a place like this, where they stay so long. Other places, they're in and out, and you can't really get attached, but here…well, you know." She grinned sheepishly at Elleyne, as if expecting the younger woman to get critical of her.

"Yes," Elleyne replied. She stared after Ad for a while after she left, thinking…

* * *

"What?" Gilderoy said, looking oddly at Elleyne, as if still caught in a dream. Maybe he was.

"I said," Elleyne repeated somewhat impatiently, "We are going to go to the apartment. Vanessa's apartment. And you're going to need to be very quiet, and very fast. We need to get back here before 6:00, so no one knows we've gone missing. I've sent Ad away, and there aren't many others around here tonight."

Gilderoy gave Elleyne a glittering, boyish grin, which made her heart wobble insanely. Or perhaps that was the sound he made along with it.

"Oh, that's wonderful, there had to be a way didn't there!"

"Ssshh! Since you're the more recognizable of the both of us, you should probably wear this."

Elleyne handed Gilderoy her bright green Healer's robe, and kept to the casual clothes she had remembered to put on under her robes. Once Gilderoy had gotten the robes on over his nightshirt, she beckoned for him to follow her, and opened the door experimentally, checking the corridor for signs of life.

"No one there. Alright, let's go," she hissed.

As they crept along beside one another, Elleyne looked at Gilderoy. He appeared pleased beyond words at the color of his new robes, and excited at the thought of where he was going. If he was scared, it didn't show very obviously.

Gilderoy and Elleyne passed through the Spell Damage door, and Elleyne spared a thought for the rest of the patients in the ward they had left. She had made sure to lock the door behind her, but she felt a stab of guilt for leaving them alone unattended. What if something happened, something like what had happened to Bode?

Forcing herself to only think on the task at hand, Elleyne continued down the stairs, Gilderoy at her side. They only passed one person on the way down, and he looked so tired and lost that Elleyne felt bad for him, and almost stopped to give him directions, when she realized there was an off chance he might recognize Gilderoy Lockhart.

Once at the ground floor, Elleyne thought she had figured out a way to get past Doris, but Doris had apparently gone to the loo for a bit. A cup of steaming tea was sitting at her desk, and a couple of impatient people, one with a fish's fins where his arms should have been were waiting on her return. The man's wife kept giving him withering looks of disgust, and muttering under her breath.

Gilderoy looked around him in mild curiosity as Elleyne pulled him quickly yet discreetly toward the door. Just a little bit, a little bit more…Elleyne thought she heard Doris's irritated voice…

And they were out, and standing on the Muggle street in front of Purge and Dowse Ltd's. A few Muggle shoppers were up at the early hour of 3:30, attempting to get some late Christmas shopping done, perhaps. A few of them gave Gilderoy's bright green robes a wary glance as they passed.

"The apartment is a few streets down," Elleyne told Gilderoy. "Hold my hand, now, and don't let go."

Gilderoy, who was still staring around speechlessly, complied, and they were gone with a loud crack.

Elleyne felt the strange, pulling sensation of apparation, and Gilderoy's hand tightened painfully in hers. With another crack, they found themselves faintly dizzy, and standing in front of a tall, thin apartment house with two levels.

"That's…" Gilderoy breathed, staring at it. He looked at Elleyne questioningly.

"That's it," she confirmed, a thought occurring to her. Walking up the steps to the door, she tried it and found it locked. To be expected. How come she hadn't thought of this earlier? She tried _Alohomora, _guessing, and guessing correctly, that it wouldn't work here. Well, that was good in part. It meant Vanessa Reid's belongings hadn't been removed from the house yet. But how to get in?

"There's an open window around this side!" Gilderoy said, coming up next to her, and jerking his head to the right, his hair flipping over in that direction.

Elleyne followed him around into the extremely narrow space between Vanessa Reid's apartment and the one next to it. Muggle cars passed them by at regular intervals, making loud and swift noises on the pavement.

Elleyne knelt down next to Gilderoy, the soles of her shoes touching the outer wall of the next apartment, and peered into a small, mouldy basement. The window through which she looked was small, but big enough for a human body, if the angle was right. She was going to climb in first, when she noticed that Gilderoy was already determinedly wriggling into the open space next to her.

"Roy, be careful, okay?" she warned, afraid that the drop might be too far.

Gilderoy winked roguishly. "I'll be fine," he told her, dropping so that he was hanging on to the window sill, and then dropping to the floor, with a loud "uuuph!"

Elleyne peered down into the darkness again.

"Fine, fine, I'm fine!" Gilderoy's voice came up to her.

"Right, I'm coming down," Elleyne said. She dropped onto her stomach and backed into the opening, sliding along on the icy ground. When she came to the windowsill, she missed it entirely, and her heart leaped into her mouth as she fell.


	15. clarity

Elleyne only had time to think frantically how her life was ending, before landing in a disgruntled heap on top of Gilderoy, who had apparently been trying to catch her.

"Ughhh…" she groaned, shifting her weight off of him. "Sorry, Roy."

"Thazallright," Gilderoy mumbled into the ground. Together they got up, dusted themselves off, and stared at their surroundings.

Vanessa Reid's basement was nothing out of the ordinary. Just a place to store anything she didn't need. From the looks of the place, she hadn't been living here very long before her death, for there wasn't much piled up.

Gilderoy searched for stairs, and soon found a set leading up from behind a stack of boxes, on top of which rested an old set of Exploding Snap cards.

"C'mon, Elleyne," he said, beckoning for her to come up with him.

"What exactly are you looking for, Roy?" Elleyne asked, stepping over a bottle with a mysterious liquid spilling out of it onto the floor.

Gilderoy looked for a second like he might not answer, standing with his head turned toward the top of the steps, breathing slowly into the musty air. Then he said silently, "Proof. Clarification."

He didn't say anything more, just turned and continued upwards. Elleyne stood for a moment, then followed.

The first floor of the apartment, which had seemed to be two floors and an attic from the outside, was small and simple, a kitchen and a living room, both lacking in space and comfort. Elleyne wondered what kind of money Vanessa had had, and what she had spent it on if it was a decent amount.

Something about this house in general was making Elleyne feel as if Vanessa must've led a rather lonely life, perhaps based solely around whatever she did for a living….a life not unlike her own.

A mewing sounded from beneath her, and Elleyne looked down to find a large, gray cat twining itself around her ankles. She reached down and petted its soft fur while watching Gilderoy survey the pictures on the mantelpiece. She could see him pick up one of a considerably pretty woman with wavy brown hair and green eyes. Elleyne stared at it, trying to imagine the woman as a girl, and Gilderoy as a boy, trying to see in her mind what could have been a lost past of the man in front of her.

It was Elleyne who found the next set of stairs, and Gilderoy pushed forward in a way that could be described as both eager and hesitant at once. His face was determinedly calm, but something in it told her he had been affected by the picture in some way. The gray cat followed them upstairs.

The top floor was a bedroom, lined with two tall bookcases on one wall, and the bed on the other. Unlike the rest of the house, this room held a bit of character. It lit up dimly when they entered, and Elleyne noticed a small writing desk on the wall to the left of her. Going over to it, she unfolded the writing surface and ran a hand over the wood. She could see various bits of paper and notes in the many cubby holes of the desk, and stretched out an arm for one of the before feeling shameful for her intrusion, and closing the desk again. The writing on the notes had all been neat and rounded, like writing had never become a chore to the woman who had lived here. She wished she had the newspaper article which had reported the death, so she might glean some information on what it was Ms. Reid had done for a living.

Gilderoy looked like he had swallowed his tongue. He was regarding the bookcase with the same demeanor as Elleyne had seen earlier, in the downstairs of the house. This time, however, she was able to label it as faint unease, rising steadily. Gilderoy turned toward her for a second, and Elleyne was sure for that moment that he would ask to leave, and to forget the whole thing. She didn't know why the feeling had come upon her, and a second later, when Gilderoy turned away again and began to peruse the bookshelves, she felt silly for thinking it.

Elleyne went to sit down on the bed, and watched as Gilderoy took a book from behind the others and opened it, flipping through it and reading the occasional part. The gray cat leapt up beside her and lay down, and still Elleyne watched, stroking it idly.

Gilderoy had found the equivalent of a diary. While he read it, he also listened to the sounds Elleyne's moving about behind him made, and was vaguely comforted for a bit. Then he got to the last three entries of the five that the book contained, and a quick change came over him.

From her position on the bed, Elleyne saw Gilderoy's back tense, and his arms lowered the book he had been reading. He stood like this for several minutes, and Elleyne didn't know whether she should speak to him or not. She was about to get up and go over to him when she he spoke.

"I _know_…"

Elleyne walked over to Gilderoy and stood behind him. "What do you mean? Have you…figured…I mean, do you know what you wanted to know?"

Gilderoy turned to face her, and his face was agonized. She was surprised at how it scared her to see him like this.

"I've done a very bad thing…" Gilderoy whispered.

The book made a hard, wooden sound as it slid out of his hands and hit the floor.


	16. emptiness

Gilderoy was four when his mother died.

The stories she told him about the woman who fell in love with the man, but never got to marry him, and instead married someone for their money, she had told these with a depth of personal feeling that Gilderoy had felt and quietly understood even though boys his age weren't supposed to understand much at all.

Juniper Lockhart never expected her son to either, unlike his father, whose demands grew more and more by the week. At one year old, when Gilderoy wasn't toilet trained already, his father had given him a small beating and a longer lecture about responsibility. But all Gilderoy could hear was his mother's crying in the background.

The next full memory he had of her was coming to the top of the stairs that led to his father's study, and knowing in his heart that something was dreadfully wrong. The words whispered in his ear over and over, and hung in the air like a deadly fog.

_Wrong Wrong Wrong_

Mum, he had whispered, knowing she couldn't hear his voice because he was speaking too low, something else his father had always hated. He stared down the winding stairs he had gone down himself many times to ask his mother to read to him at night, or to see a picture he had drawn. The darkness gaped at him, and a dull pounding filled his ears. This time he knew something else, just like he knew when his mother was telling him the stories, he had known she was talking about herself and that she _needed _to tell someone, almost to apologize.

He knew that the stairs weren't safe and he shouldn't go down them tonight. He knew that there was something terribly wrong. Something the blackness, perhaps mercifully, wouldn't let him see.

_Mum Mum Mum I'm scared don't leave me alone._

He could've gone back to his room. It was still night and time that he should be getting to bed without a story anyway, or else his father might…

Swishing down the hall in his pajamas with the hippogriffs on them, surrounded by a blue that was a fake sky and made him feel hatred under the yellow hall lights, Gilderoy found his father.

Nerolinus Lockhart had looked down at this son, and saw in his face that he was too afraid to be lying about what he felt. What he knew. He told Gilderoy to go to bed twice, but Gilderoy followed him anyway, swishing back down the hall, very conscious of his footsteps, down down down, until they reached the top of the stairs with the…

Gilderoy's father lit up his wand, and the whole room went up with it. Nerolinus looked lost for a moment, but Gilderoy knew exactly where to look. The foot of the stairs. There she lay sprawled, her head tilted to the side, still partially resting on the last step, face in some sort of grimace. The air smelled like death.

His father said in a controlled voice that he would have it cleaned up soon, told Gilderoy not to talk to anyone about it, and so the image remained lurking on the edge of the boy's mind.

Gilderoy would sit munching toast slowly, feeling it like ashes in his mouth, while his father told him that he had contacted the Ministry and they had seen to everything, and how he should practice his letters because he was terribly behind. And Gilderoy knew that no one had contacted the Ministry at all.

And even though he didn't know the word, it whispered softly in the dark next to him when he was in bed alone, coming through a crack in the window and snuffing the candle that had been maybe guttering weakly next to his bed.

_Suicide._


	17. types of love

Gilderoy found love at a very early age. He loved to draw, to paint, to make things come to life through his quill when he really should have been studying. The older boys in Slytherin house would make fun of this whenever they got the advantage, but Gilderoy didn't let it bother him. Most of his friends weren't in Slytherin anyway, and at times he wondered why he was. All the time.

Slytherins were all about claiming, about making things _theirs. _About who got the seat in front of the fire in the deathly cold common room, and _really_. Gilderoy couldn't see the use for it.

Sometimes, he supposed, drawing or painting was like a way of claiming things, making them his once they were on the page. And he did own them in a way, after that. Without him they wouldn't exist. He was the creator. And when a tree was in full flower, he could draw it, and then when autumn came, the tree wouldn't look the same, but Gilderoy could always remember how it looked because he would have the sketch. He was the preserver.

Gilderoy could remember showing his pictures to his mother only once…before the thing concerning the word he would rather not remember happened. She had smiled in a secretive type of way and handing them back to him, ruffling his hair and telling him they were lovely. Then she had continued to sit at her desk, looking at her lap and tracing a sickle-sized bruise on her left arm repeatedly.

His father hated it. Drawing, painting, these were things for girls, and never acceptable for a Lockhart. Gilderoy had come to have to hide his sketchbooks, paint and quills every time, for every time his father caught him with anything like that, it was burned, and Gilderoy was made to watch. Then he was punished. But it was the watching that hurt Gilderoy the most, seeing his creations go up in flames, and knowing that for while they seemed indestructible fresh on the page, these things of his were flimsy, weak, and susceptible to flame. And it was as he watched the paper curling, blackening at the edges, the strokes which had been so carefully executed devoured mercilessly, that he realized, each time anew, his own heady and sickening mortality.

But Gilderoy learned, and he hid these things away, worked on them when he could be relatively sure he wouldn't be caught by the condemning eye of his father.

When Gilderoy fell in love a second time, it was not easy to hide. In fact, he couldn't hide it. A giggle here, a shy glance there, and the girl, the girl who crept silently with the freckled face, the chestnut hair and the green eyes would come to watch him. Come to watch him paint, or draw, to make _art _and to struggle with some forbidden passion. She saw it, she was intrigued. And so every day the girl checked for him, and when he was there, she watched.

And soon he started doing it for her, more than himself even. Art was a selfish thing, always had been, and always would be to an extent. But she was his audience, his silent support, the breathing proof that he lived through his work, and she could see him in it too. In the next year, when the childlike shyness had left them for curiosity's sake, they became close friends. Her name was Vanessa.

His father hated her. The girl across the street was a nuisance, not very well off, and likely a squib. And every time Gilderoy was seen with Vanessa, he would be punished. But he could not hide her, not like his paintings and favorite bottle of ink. Vanessa was a different kind of love, a love that doesn't realize itself until it realizes it's not supposed to exist. Some days he would make excuses not to be with her, and he felt stupid on those days, for all they ever did was play, and watch him paint, and draw. Draw and paint. For her.

Gilderoy had always known he wasn't brave. If he had been brave, he wouldn't have hidden in the recesses of his mind, scared to come out, scared because he couldn't face his father, scared because girls were different from art. He couldn't claim her, she wasn't his. Did he want her to be? He knew he wanted her, and that scared him. Disgusted him. Because he was scared, and because she wasn't his, couldn't be his, he needed to get her. But he was scared. It always came back to that. Fear was, as only those who have known it in itself will know, the most life draining force existing.

So Gilderoy continued to play with Vanessa, and to hide from his father. But really he hid from them both, because she couldn't know how he felt. But sometimes, in a passing smile, in a radiant glance, he sensed that she did know, and was _waiting _for something, he didn't know what.

The garden grew around him and he moved imperceptibly to put the first strokes down of the shape he saw in the page. Because this day he knew how to claim…how to show…her.


	18. an empty love begins

**a/n: j.i.c. anyone wonders, a nundu is like a deadly panther thing...I think. It's in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them...which is a great book to get, btw.**

He had failed.

Nights for Gilderoy were the worst. The tightening of a hard, cold hand upon his arm, Vanessa's silent breath so loud in his ears, his father demanding again and again "What are you hiding from me?!"

He stood, mute, as his father went to where she was hidden, too scared to do what he knew he should. He was sixteen for sakes alive, seventeen before the summer was out. But he was scared. Furious, scared and feeling helpless as he watched him scream at them, every muted word a slam to his chest, and he couldn't look at Vanessa.

His father had hit him, and told him to leave. And he had left. It probably wasn't as abrupt as he remembered it, but then he would have rather never remembered such a thing happening.

Nights were the worst because he remembered then.

Gilderoy could recall clearly being cast out, but the desperation, in itself at an extreme, was nothing that _could _be replicated. Quite aside from having nothing in the way of money after two months, Gilderoy could not stop thinking of her. It was an obsession, a dangerous one, for his mind was consumed with her, and every night he would tear it apart with thoughts of her.

Over the years, Gilderoy grew to believe (as people will make themselves believe) that he hated Vanessa. Why hadn't she come after him? She should've supported him, why did he have to do everything himself? Would she just find another, didn't she see how worthwhile he was? He was better than she was. And braver. She hadn't believed in him, that was the problem. He could fight her dragons, he would make her see her mistake.

The years accumulated, and so did the restless nights, only quicker than the years. And Gilderoy began to believe himself.

Nights.

One morning, he found himself at the doorstep of an elderly wizard who had once slain a dragon and a nundu. The morning was wet with mist, and Gilderoy licked his lips in preparation, twice, before knocking. After two minutes silence, the sound of shuffling footsteps could be heard, and his sleep deprived body hardly tensed. He knew what was coming, and he was half full of a strange anticipation as he saw the weary old face peer out a window before continuing to the door. Good. Because it was too late for regrets, he wouldn't feel them.

Gilderoy grinned in preparation.

The door knob turned.

It was decided.

The door opened, and the lies began.


	19. into the sun

"Roy.."

Elleyne came over to pick up the book and put it back on the shelf. Gilderoy didn't move as she bent down next to him, and for a minute she was intensely afraid she had caused him to "snap" in some way. What would they think back…?

But it was a false thought.

_You know you never intended to go back._

She should've known, the thought shouldn't have come as such a surprise to her. But perhaps the real thoughts she was—had been—entertaining up to this moment were under lock and key for a reason. The word "ridiculous" came to mind, but she pushed it aside. Shafts of light were slipping through the blinds, and Elleyne knew that it was nearing six o' clock. What it would mean for her now she didn't know. Gilderoy was standing with an odd expression on his almost boyish features, looking lost in thought or memory, or something in between. At the sound of his name, he looked around dazedly, scared.

"It was bad…I've done something awful…"

Elleyne didn't want to entertain the thought that he had remembered exactly who he had been, though by how he was acting, she felt it was a hollow hope. Reaching a hand out to his shoulder, she tried to calm him, but Gilderoy looked beyond agitated now.

"Why didn't you tell me?!" he said suddenly, uncharacteristically harsh. "I took from all those people…I took from them to feed the emptiness, to feed the ego…"

"It wasn't time yet," Elleyne said softly but firmly. She was sure Gilderoy remembered a lot more about the self-serving ways of his past than she had ever known. There was something in the way he looked now that made him seem more whole, a complete man. A man with a past behind him. Catching herself, she realized it was the first time she had consciously thought of Gilderoy, with his childish temperament of before, as a man. It was oddly stirring.

Gilderoy's mind was teeming with the lost memories of years past, finally coming back to him, a light coming at him somewhere like a cave, feeling confused and lost, yet careless and exuberant.

The face of a white bearded old man staring him through with a gaze so strong, that even in his memory he could not turn away.

"Impaled upon your own sword, Gilderoy?"

"Yes…" Gilderoy whispered in a choked voice. His face looked drained, and white. When he looked back at the concerned Elleyne, she opened her mouth to say something, but he smiled, shaking the grimness away.

"The girl, Vanessa," he said factually, dulled feeling behind every word. "I loved…you know. I loved her, I suppose."

Elleyne stared at him strangely, painfully across an atmosphere of dust charging the long-abandoned air. She waited for him to go on.

"I know."

"That was a long time ago."

There was a very pregnant pause, before Gilderoy continued.

"My mother committed suicide when I was four years old. My father used to hurt her, and he hurt me too. She threw herself down the cellar stairs. My father never told anyone, he couldn't have them examine her body. It wasn't all that bad all the time. He gave me a lot of stuff after that, material comforts that didn't mean anything, but he still wouldn't let me draw. And then when I went to school, I was sorted into Slytherin. Not Ravenclaw like my mother, Slytherin like _him_. I used to wonder what it meant, but now I know it just means I'm a coward. There was a girl, and I loved her, and she's gone now. Self preservation. I'll never know what that might have been like…." He trailed off, staring into space, wrestling with what he had said.

Elleyne had never felt more like an intruder on the life of someone else than she did now. She was reminded of Vanessa's strange death as described in the Daily Prophet, how she had ended up outside in midwinter at the bottom of her apartment steps, dressed for bed. She had cracked her head on the cement, that much had been obvious…but why? Had there been some unknown component, some waking dream that had caused her to stumble to the door and out into what she thought were the arms of someone lost to her? Or was Elleyne full of crazy imaginings, brought on by her uncomfortable situation? She couldn't help but wonder…

She cast around for something to focus on, to tear her out of her thoughts, and her eyes met Gilderoy's.

"It's okay if you need more time," she told him. "It's going to take time to get over this."

Gilderoy looked at her strangely, and his eyes hardened with determination.

"No," he said. "I'm not going to need more time. I had time to think it over before, and look what happened to me then. What's important is the present. None of that matters now, no matter if it hurts or not. And besides, we're out of time."

Reaching into his robes (or rather, Elleyne's robes), Gilderoy pulled out a silver pocket watch she quickly recognized as her own, and held it by the chain in front of her.

6:43 a.m.

Elleyne was shot through with a jolt of panic, and swayed where she was standing. How could it have been so much later than she had thought? Trying desperately to quell her rush of fear, Elleyne noticed Gilderoy was still looking intently at her. She decided she had might as well confess.

"Roy….I can't…."

But she stopped. His eyes were suddenly alight with a defiance and strange sort of excitement she had never seen before.

"Of course," he said musingly, as if he had caught an idea on her earlier and was just now giving his opinion to her. Their eyes connected and there was an understanding between them so intense that both of them felt a bit frightened by it.

Elleyne's eyes widened. _Where?_

A pause. And then, "I know."

Gilderoy stared Elleyne in the eyes unflinchingly. And then she understood.

"_Oh…_"

He smiled an unsuitably rakish grin for the situation, and they clasped hands in the center of the room. Elleyne's face twisted into deep concentration as she closed her eyes…remembering.

The next minute they were gone.

The dust motes filtered through the still, now lit up old bedroom that had belonged to Vanessa Reid. The sound of a loud crack reverberated silently around the room, stirring the air. And the portrait of the pretty young girl over the bed curved her mouth into a mysterious smile.


	20. the hunters and the hunted

St. Mungo's hospital for Magical Maladies was in an uproar. There hadn't been news of this sort since Bode had been strangled by his own plant…but even then, the procedure in which everyone found out had been a lot less…explosive.

The uproar was coming from the large number of patients who were becoming cranky and disgruntled from having to wait to be directed to a room. The witch at the Inquiries desk had gone upstairs to try and gain entry to the closed ward to find out "Was he really _gone_?" and had been neglecting her duties for the past hour.

But upstairs, the doors to the ward in question were firmly locked, despite the protests of several employees who hadn't had this much to talk about in work for a long time. A witch with chrome colored hair kept sloshing her tea all over as she turned to speak to everyone, claiming she had seen Gilderoy Lockhart leave the building.

Behind the locked doors, Josh Brodyn was ignoring the protests of the others that they had "a right to see what had happened to the dashing young man". This was partially because he was furious.

"Are you absolutely sure…how could you _do _this, Adalone!!" he whispered so loudly that it looked like he was going to scream. Adalone Loell, who was trailing along after him on his fifth crossing of the room, was glad he didn't scream. She didn't want _that_ kind of statement to be let out to the group outside.

"I didn't do it," Ad reminded unhappily. "It was Elleyne who—

Brodyn waved a hand in front of her in such a frantic manner that it would have been funny were the situation not quite so serious.

"I know it was Elleyne!" he hissed. "Of course it was Elleyne...I should have fired her before this, but you know how it goes with single women with no other job…Well so much for my sympathetic look on the lot. From now on, NO one…NO one…"

He stopped in the midst of rifling through the missing Lockhart's drawers, holding up a singled, crumpled letter in a shaking hand.

"This…this is it. _This _is the bottom line." Brodyn's lips came together in a tight smile.

Although she couldn't deny that what Elleyne did was wrong on so many levels, Ad remembered the enjoyable conversations she had had with the younger witch. She couldn't imagine why Elleyne would do such a thing in the first place…maybe she wasn't quite as good as she had seemed, but whatever the case, Ad couldn't help feeling anxious for her at the look on Brodyn's face.

"Luckily," Brodyn said, standing up and beckoning to Ad. She came and stood next to him, wondering why he was acting darkly pleased all of a sudden.

"Luckily, Elleyne may have been wearing her Healer's robes when she left. If so…"

Brodyn took a flat, black disc out of his large pocket, and began to polish it on his robes, muttering some sort of prayer for luck to himself. Ad looked on, mystified.

"Er…Mr. Brodyn? What _is _that?" she asked, unable to contain herself.

Brodyn took out his wand and placed the tip of it on the disk.

"This, Adalone," he said, "is a tracking device, employed by the Hospital in times of emergencies _like this one_. Fortunately, there have been no emergencies like this one, well…as long as I've been here anyway."

He paused to savor the idea that he'd been working here forever. Ad didn't think it wise to mention to him that the first twenty of the twenty-two years he'd been here, he was a cleaner of bed pans.

Forming his face into a mask of deep concentration, Brodyn waited, the tip of his wand just touching the surface of the flat, black disc. He kept holding the surface above Ad's line of vision, which she was just beginning to feel miffed about, when he let out a cry of satisfaction.

Lowering the disc, he stared at its surface. Ad looked too, and was surprised to see that a picture was now moving under the surface of the disc. It was Elleyne and someone else, moving along down some sort of street toward an apparent destination. The disc was too small for her to see their features clearly, but the glowing green that kept blinking on and off on one of the figures was indicative of Healer's robes.

"What do you do…track everyone's robes?" Ad asked, going a bit pale.

"Exactly," Brodyn said, looking pleased.

While Ad searched her robes with an uncomfortable look on her face, Brodyn took out some sort of walkie-talkie and shouted into it.

"We have a location!"

_Poor Elleyne, _Ad thought, looking up. _Whatever were you thinking? _


	21. solace

Gilderoy followed only a pace or two behind Elleyne as they hurried down the quiet street. They both felt, and knew the other felt as well, a sense of urgency that they obeyed without question. But Gilderoy still couldn't keep from peering around at the large houses with the darkened windows, probing his sleeping memory of this place and finding that he would rather have not remembered anything at all, for there was little about this neighborhood he could equate with happiness.

Elleyne had other worries on her mind. How could they know for sure that the house could be found again? Gilderoy's father had put a charm on it for that very reason, and Elleyne had only been able to find it with Dumbledore's instructions, but she couldn't seem to remember how to get past the concealment charm she knew would be in place. She was on the edge of a dread which told her this was all wrong, and she should just give in to the idea that there was nowhere safe to hide. But why had Gilderoy insisted they come here? Back at Reid's apartment, there had been a look in his eyes that made the whole thing seem anything but ridiculous, made it seem as if it _must _happen…but Elleyne could find none of that certainty now. She continued to walk up the street, to the point where Vanessa's childhood home was to the right of her, took a deep breath, and turned around.

The house was there, in the open. Gilderoy stopped next to her and followed her gaze.

"That's it," he breathed. He looked half-frightened, but he had determination in the rigidity of his body that told her in the few magic minutes back at the apartment, she had not been wrong in what she thought she had seen. Gilderoy had become something else.

Elleyne knew this line of thought was a stretch, but so was everything she was doing lately. In a sort of startled realization, she knew that she had changed as well, though she couldn't begin to guess how.

"How?" was the question that mistakenly slipped from her lips as she continued to stare, hands at her sides, up at the looming, aristocratic structure, which Gilderoy may or may not have ever considered 'home.'

Gilderoy looked at her questioningly.

"What's wrong?" he asked, giving all signs that he was ready to cross the street, to get inside and away from the watchful windows staring down at them.

"It's just that…last time I was here, the house was hidden. Your—well, you know…he kept it hidden. And now it looks like we could walk right on in."

Gilderoy stared at her for a second, then proceeded to cross the street quickly. Surprised, Elleyne jogged after him, enjoying the feeling of wearing mundane clothes that would not burden her.

Gilderoy, in a manner of surprising boldness, stepped up to the door and hesitated, just for a second, before bringing the knocker down hard. They waited several long seconds, Elleyne paused in a motion up the stone stairway, one foot on the step even with Gilderoy, whose heart was pounding in his mouth.

There was no reply.

Trying his luck, Gilderoy turned the handle of the door, and it swung inward with an ominous creak. Elleyne could not understand their luck at all; where was Gilderoy's father? There were no signs of even a diminutive house-elf in the shadowy entryway. This felt somehow wrong. She jumped as she felt Gilderoy grasp her hand lightly, and she followed him into the house.

They went up the spiral staircase Elleyne knew from her last unenviable visit, past the study where she had talked to Lockhart senior, and kept going up. At one point, Elleyne felt as if her head was spinning from the sheer repetition of the circles they were makes around a barely existent center. It was likely the fact that she'd gotten next to no sleep the night before, and nothing to eat at all, but she started to sway alarmingly. Gilderoy saw that she was faring badly, and fell back to support her.

"I'm sorry, we're almost there," he whispered.

"How big..big is this house?"

Elleyne held in her urge to throw up all over him. Why was it so frustratingly dark up here? Someone could fall on these stairs…fall and die. The notion was all too familiar, and she quickly blocked it out, standing at last next to Gilderoy at what appeared to be the end of the stairs.

There was a narrow hallway and a wider passageway that looked like it had been used much more frequently than the former. They met right in front of the two, and Elleyne vaguely appreciated how odd the design of this mansion really was. She eyed the narrow passageway, the wood coated with dust and looking thoroughly forgotten, like some old storage space.

"That's the one we're taking, isn't it?" she asked the silent form next to her.

Somewhere along the way, she had just begun to assume that Gilderoy knew where he was taking her.

_What are we doing? _She thought suddenly. _What do we _really_ think we're doing?_

And it was at this odd moment that Elleyne felt a rush of excitement in her veins in answer to her own question. Yet it was not an answer at all. She felt exhausted, and revitalized at the same time.

Gilderoy half-smiled at her and nodded. "Yes," he said, in answer to her question. Stooping a bit, he started down the passageway. Elleyne felt a tug on her hand and noticed it was still entwined in his. Without pause, she continued after him.

Gilderoy's mind was in overdrive now, though he did not show it. This passageway in which an adult had to stoop, yet a child could enter at will, it's memories flooding back to him, were not horrible but exciting in some thin, hard to understand way. The apprehension, the excitement was all there, just as it had been before, just as it had been with her years before.

Except now there was no fear.

Now it felt right.

Gilderoy reached the end of the passageway, and was met abruptly by the hard, stone wall. His heart accelerated, doing a sort of hop-skip in his body that was thoroughly unappreciated as he lowered himself to the ground, and let his fingers search for what he knew was here, should be here…

Elleyne watched him in his search, watched his quiet desperation and didn't understand.

"Roy, what…?" she began, but his fingers had found hold of what he was looking for, and he pulled sharply on the board in front of him, exposing a dark emptiness beyond. Elleyne breathed out slowly, staring in wonder. She started to edge closer, but Gilderoy shook his head, and she stopped, confused.

All of a sudden, he looked extremely shy, and he peered into the hole in the floor with some trepidation, and something sad written on the edge of his face, all that she could see from her vantage point on the floor.

For a moment, Gilderoy's eyes remained clouded in some intensely wistful memory. Then he spoke unexpectedly, still staring at the gap in the floorboards.

"Close your eyes."

It was the least thing she expected him to say, and she remained kneeling for a while before asking.

"Why?"

"Just…" Gilderoy was displaying that odd sort of shyness that was so unlike him again. "Just do it."

She heard his plea, and complied. Elleyne heard him hesitate, to make sure she was really doing as he had asked, and then heard a loud, grating sound. She had a strange feeling that the room around her had been lit up, and then Gilderoy's voice came to her again.

"Okay. Before you open your eyes, I guess I want to tell you that this wasn't intended for you. It was something I did a long time ago, something I meant to show to her…Vanessa, I mean. But it never happened. We got caught, and I was thrown out of home. This sort of thing was forbidden by my father. But he's not here now, for whatever reason. And I wanted you to know that even if it wasn't intended for you, it's every bit yours as it is hers. I figured it out at the apartment, figured everything out really, and well…you can open your eyes now."

Elleyne did so, and drew in her breath softly. A girl was staring back at her, a portrait of a girl with chestnut curls and green, softly staring, laughing eyes. The atmosphere around her was a compelling mix of browns and yellows, and the paint was so superbly blended. At the risk of sounding cliché, it took her breath away. The girl looked about fourteen and her chin was resting on her hand. She was wearing a pale yellow dress.

Elleyne stared into Vanessa's eyes, and they became one. It was the simplest thing in the world. There was no awkwardness, and she was in the painting it seemed, and the painting was in her, and she felt odd and exhilarated, and _right, _and then his lips touched hers, and she burned with completeness, falling to the floor hard and feeling nothing and everything. She reached into him, and their souls twined and danced under a mellow moonlight of their desires.

The word "artist" might have formed on her lips at some point, and they were lying on the ground. She could hear Gilderoy's heartbeat in her back, reverberating through her bones, and her hair was loose and flowing, a dark blonde river of shampoo-smelling stupidity. It didn't matter. They laid there for several long minutes that could have really been hours, and that _did _matter, she thought.

And then Gilderoy turned his head into her hair, tightening his arm around her, and whispered so that she could barely catch the words.

"I'll fight your dragons."

Elleyne closed her eyes, pulled herself closer to the warmth of his body, still clothed in her robes, and started to slip away.

A loud crash came from a mile below them, and voices sounded, demanding, sharp against the dreamlike quiet. Elleyne's eyes flew open and she turned her head and looked into Gilderoy's eyes.

Somehow, they had been found.


	22. fighting dragons

Elleyne lay in frightened silence, her hand slipping through Gilderoy's tousled hair to land at her side. Her body tensed from her position on the floor, and Gilderoy's heartbeat was loud in her ears, though not loud enough to drown out the noise of the approaching danger.

Daringly, Elleyne thought she recognized a couple of the voices below them. They were getting closer, she could hear them searching in various places, climbing, climbing the stairs, the same stairs that had made her dizzy to the point of vomiting. It didn't seem to be slowing their pursuers down one bit.

_It must take a while for them to search the whole mansion, _she thought desperately. _By chance they might never find us after all. _But she knew her hopes were wooden, and in that moment she was intensely glad for the man next to her. As long as she wasn't alone, Elleyne felt she could face jail. Even if it was a few years in Azkaban.

She had no idea how many people had come into the house in the first place, but she got the impression that there were a lot of them, and that they were slowly dispersing on different levels, searching tirelessly everywhere they could. Soon only a few pairs of feet could be heard, right under them, some solitary voices speaking, and Elleyne felt Gilderoy's body tense silently as she realized she could hear them perfectly clear now.

"Why…they're right under us," she thought. And then the footsteps stopped, and she knew they were faced the split in the passageways…knew that their eyes were piercing the darkness only seconds in front of where she and Gilderoy lay.

The voices of the men—two men and a woman were speaking. Gilderoy grasped Elleyne tightly, and Elleyne curled into him. They curled into each other, as if they could disappear that way. The voices were speaking, and still they heard.

"You two go that way," a commanding man's voice said.

"You sure they haven't got them already below?"

"No, that would be Roderick tripping over himself."

Elleyne held her breath, for she recognized the voice of the man in charge. Brodyn.

And then the time was up. Footsteps, shaking the dust-coated floor they were lying on, began to sound. Gilderoy shifted, and raised himself into a standing position. Elleyne stared up at him, uncomprehending, pleading him not to do anything. She wanted to tell him it was all her fault, and that he should let them return him to the Hospital, not to get into trouble over her.

Gilderoy reached down and lifted Elleyne to her feet. Before she could utter a word, he had shoved her roughly into a door to the left of them, a door she had not noticed before, and closed it firmly. Elleyne lay in the still darkness of the next room, not knowing what to do. Her instincts kept her from pounding on the door, and her throat felt dry.

_Just let them take you, _she thought fearfully, _let them take you. Roy, now is not the time to be brave. _

Her lips still tasted like his. And in the darkness, Elleyne waited.

Outside in the hall, Gilderoy turned, his back against the door, and waited. He didn't have long to wait. His newly rejuvenated mind raced madly inside himself, as he saw them approach him. A man and a woman. Both professionally dressed as members of the St. Mungo's staff. Both wielding wands, which they immediately lowered upon seeing him.

Gilderoy stepped forward to meet them, not allowing himself to dwell on what he was about to do.

"Mr. Lockhart." The man smiled at him in a way that was most sickening and condescending. "I know this might be frightening for you…"

Gilderoy wasn't listening as Brodyn continued to talk. His stuffed his hands into his pockets, all too conscious of the fact that he was sweating.

_Don't be a coward, stop them, stop them. _

_HOW?!_

Gilderoy's hand came across something hard and wooden, and he stopped fidgeting. Elleyne's wand. A shaky smile came across his face.

Brodyn was still speaking.

"…Now, if you'll just go with Janice here," he indicated the woman, who smiled falsely. "I'm just going to check around back there…is that a picture?"

Brodyn started forward, and his eyes came across the door behind which Elleyne was hidden.

"Move aside."

"No."

"Move—

The next thing Gilderoy did, he did quickly, and without thinking. All that was in his mind was Elleyne's face, and as Brodyn's arm gripped his own, he felt his father's hand across his face, and Elleyne's wand was out and pointing straight at the startled man, and when he spoke next, his voice was passionate and indicative of a resurgence of memory, and though he hardly knew what he was doing, Gilderoy did what he could do best. He felt the force tingling along his wand arm; it was going to be enormous, and there was nothing he could do to stop it if he had wanted to.

"OBLIVIATE!"


	23. epilogue

**EPILOGUE**

**OR, WHAT WAS FOUND**

It was raining at the edge of Surrey, and a dozen other places all around. The air was humid and dark, with a pale new moon attempting to steal its way through the clouds. The death of the world's greatest White Wizard had fallen over countless lives like a suffocating blanket of dull color.

In one of these houses bordering Surrey, a small brick house with pale yellow flowers gracing the curtains, sat a man with wavy blond hair, dressed in turquoise robes, bent over a bound journal, scribbling, apparently oblivious to the rain that threatened to break the windowpanes of his home.

A step sounded in the open door behind the man, and he looked up, moving to hide the journal under the table as if on an afterthought.

The woman in the doorway had already seen, and she came forward, smiling slightly, tiredly.

"What're you up to, dear?"

"Trying my hand at writing again, if you must know, Elleyne." He grinned at her enigmatically. "I think I'm on to a great idea for a book."

"Hopefully it's better than your last few."

"Haha. She's a funny woman, she is," Gilderoy muttered. "You told me you were going to sleep."

Elleyne sighed.

"Look…I know it's been a week and I shouldn't think on it any longer—he wouldn't want me to think about it…but Dumbledore's death…I just can't seem to accept it. After he helped us so much over a year back. He saved our lives, cleared our names…after, you know…he got us started in this life, and I just feel like we never got the chance to repay him."

Gilderoy had stopped handling his journal, and nodded. After a while he spoke.

"I know what you mean. In a way, this," he indicated the book. "Is trying to make up for it. Dumbledore has…well, he's given me advantages I didn't even deserve."

He laughed. "But I'm thinking he's not wanting us to feel this way…if you know what I mean."

"Yes." Elleyne moved over to his side and placed her hand on his shoulder. He touched it affectionately with his own.

Then, smiling darkly, mysteriously, she added. "He would want us to live on, live life to the fullest, and leave a legacy behind."

She stressed these last few words gently, hintingly, and Gilderoy turned to her questioningly.

Elleyne placed a hand on her stomach, mysterious smile still in place.

Gilderoy's eyes grew wide.

"Really, then?" he asked weakly.

She nodded. Her eyes were tearing up.

Gilderoy stood up beside his wife, drawing his arm around her waist and placing his hand on hers.

"We should go to bed," Elleyne said tremulously. "I've said what I need to."

"Of course," smiled Gilderoy, staring wonderingly at where there hands came together on her stomach, so ordinary looking now.

Lives have ended. And lives begin.

Gilderoy took her hand and led her upstairs.

**The End.**


End file.
